Hell hath no fury like a daughter scorned. In the short film Grief Retreat, directed by Jeremie Cander and written by Cassandra Hunter, a quirky mother-daughter bonding trip turns sour after the mother, diagnosed with a terminal illness tries to make the most of a spa weekend getaway planned by her daughter, only to find out that her headstrong daughter has signed them up for a grief wellness retreat to tackle their issues.
The short film, executive produced by Issa Rae, made its debut this year at the Hollyshorts Film Festival. Here, Hunter opens up to Deadline about unraveling familial bonds and embracing all the fears that come with being vulnerable.
DEADLINE: What led you to write Grief Retreat?
CASSANDRA HUNTER: I’ve been writing about my mom for a while. I’m very close to her. She’s from Thailand, so we have a lot of cultural differences. My whole life I’ve had such a struggle to connect with her in more vulnerable moments. I’m an artist, very sensitive, and she’s very positive, but she doesn’t reveal much. During that time, I was coming out of the Covid lockdowns, and I was away from home at grad school in San Francisco. My mom lives in North Carolina. I had all this anxiety about, like, what if we never get to finish fixing the thing? Which is: I just want to know you. And she didn’t really share much. And I came to learn that there are reasons for that, and I just had to kind of let that go.
I get emotional thinking about it, but finally, I was like, I have to put this down and look at it through the lens of absurdist humor. I would never kidnap my mom and take her anywhere to make her solve something with me, but there’s just this big question, especially with my filmmaking team, because we were part of ColorCreative’s Find Your People program, and I asked the group, “What’s on everyone’s heart right now?” And it was kismet. All of us were having this anxiety about losing our parents. I don’t know what was in the air at that time. That became the launching pad for the mother-daughter story about this manifestation of a daughter’s anxiety and a mother’s confusion.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about LA retreat culture. How LA are you exactly? And have you been to one of these retreats?
HUNTER: I am not very LA retreat culture [laughs]. But I have friends who are. I think the concept was born from a desire to both speak towards something bougie. I call myself that. I’m a little bougie. I like nice things.
DEADLINE: OK, but have you been to Erewhon?
HUNTER: I haven’t quite done that yet, but I go to Whole Foods. I’m not quite ready to spend $20 on a smoothie. Times are tough.
Look, I have a lot of friends who have done the Eat, Pray, Love kind of trips to Bali and whatnot, and I was watching The White Lotus. That story is a little different because they’re on a vacation, but to me, the aspect of a retreat has always been symbolic of trying to escape some of the aspects of American life that are in the mind. We retreat because we need a place to go to feel our emotions. We can’t just go about it in our everyday life. I ended up actually googling if there were grief retreats, and there are. I was like, I have to explore further because I always think of retreats as for yoga and wellness. So, the idea sprouted up from wanting to blend some things with luxury wellness and vulnerability.
Cassandra Hunter
Mark St. Cyr
DEADLINE: You mentioned ColorCreative earlier, and I know Issa Rae is an EP on this. Talk a little more about this collaboration.
HUNTER: ColorCreative launched this program called Find Your People. I was in the inaugural cohort, where they had seven disciplines that year. So, you have writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, production designers and costume designers. You get in, and they assign you to your filmmaking group. There were four teams, and it was basically a way to just bring people together. Then you get a budget to make your short and have that exposure. I think of that phrase I’ve heard Issa say before, something like, “Network across, you can make things happen with the people around you.” It’s a really cool collective. I’m so grateful that I got to be part of that.
DEADLINE: What was it like working with director Jeremie Cander to bring your vision to life? Can you also talk about those first initial feelings watching the short film for the first time?
HUNTER: I’m very critical of my own work. It’s hard [to watch your own film] because you don’t have the audience to feel out how it’s landing, and we’re all so close to it that we know what’s about to happen. So, the first few times, it was just such an exercise in trusting that the audience will get it. Our cinematographer [Matt Kleppner], I hear nothing but great things about how beautiful the film looks, and they’re absolutely right. It was really cool, though, to see a story I wrote through having had so many other hands on it, a director with her vision, and then the actors and what they got out of it. I hadn’t been part of a process like that before, as I usually direct or act in my own projects. It was really rewarding, and it was very affirming because I felt like people were connecting to it.
DEADLINE: I want to dig deeper into some of the themes of the film here and your background. I love this line that the daughter says to her mother, “We’re running out of time, and I still don’t know who the f**k you are.” There’s this conversation about Black women always carrying trauma while also being super resilient. I’m wondering how you connect to this in your own life, especially with being biracial.
HUNTER: I’ll start with that line. Hearing you say it back to me just now, I was thinking that it was me saying that to myself. I needed to know; I had such a yearning to know more about my mom because I was still shaping my identity and very confused. I grew up in a very all-American southern town. I was National Honor Society president and cheer captain. I was just such an overachiever. Looking back, I realize I was doing all of that because I wanted to feel valued. So, as a Black Asian American woman in the South, there’s subconscious and sometimes not subconscious messaging that you’re not the standard of excellence or beauty or what have you.
With Grief Retreat, you see the two sides of that. You see, Lynette [LaRita Shelby], the mother, who is very much like you should put your head down, be successful, achieve, achieve, achieve, and you don’t talk about these other things, don’t let it get you down. That’s very much her perspective. Like I provided, I succeeded, and now I’m faced with a shitty circumstance, but that’s life. And then you have Bria [Mysti Adams], the daughter, who is a child of someone who is able to give her a lot of privilege and freedom to think about her emotions and be reflective. They are a part of different generations. So, I almost see the two of them as two parts of me.
The question comes from needing something from my mom, but the answer has always been about, as a Black woman, as a biracial woman of color, I can exist in multitudes and still be loved and valued. Ultimately, I hope that’s what people leave with – that you can be vulnerable. And if you’re not, the people who love you really would like you to be. Unfortunately, we don’t know how long we’ll be here for. So, I hope that this encourages Black women to take off the superhero cape and let themselves be seen more.
