I chose to make Classic Water with two core beliefs. First, that structure and "classical" patterns are innate to people, and that a filmmaking process that delves purely into sparseness, slowness, and intuition would come full circle into an understandable pattern for audiences. Second, the belief that a collective future is only possible if individuals can reckon with their traumas and histories. For these reasons, I ended up making a sparse 35mm short about a boy removing himself from society for a day, and being forced to reckon with his repressed pain.