( Out of the parenthesis ) is a short film I wrote, directed, co-produced, and co-edited, the project where I wore every hat and meant it.

The story came from something I kept noticing across many East Asian families around me: what happens to a woman who has spent so long taking care of everyone else that she has forgotten who she was before all of it. Qingmei, my protagonist, is 45, trapped not by cruelty but by something quieter: decades of habit, silence, and a marriage that slowly made her invisible. Her story is not one woman's story. It is a portrait of a dynamic I have witnessed repeat itself across generations of East Asian households, where endurance becomes so routine that a woman's own unhappiness stops feeling like something worth naming.

Intimate and largely told through silence, the film is a female-driven drama about identity, the invisible cage of fear and habit, and the gentle understanding that blooms between two women across generations, a story that ends not with escape, but with a long-overdue return to herself, nudged by her daughter who simply leaves a train ticket on a pile of folded laundry and says nothing more.

I built this film from the ground up. I wrote the screenplay through multiple drafts, developed the visual language, cast the characters, scouted locations, created the production book, broke down every scene, and directed all three shoot days. In post, I co-edited the film into its final shape. Every creative decision from the way a character holds her chopsticks to the silence between two lines of dialogue was something I thought through, fought for, and put on screen myself.