The poetic metaphor of love — the kind you want, but can’t ever fully erase from yourself — felt deeply in tune with my creative temperament and with my life experience: maybe not vast, but rich in romances and goodbyes. It’s as if, in a debut work, you instinctively want to talk about what you actually know.

Still, I wanted to tell this thematically familiar story in a way that could also reveal my directorial individuality — to shape my own voice. To speak to the viewer not with a blunt, maximalist manifesto, but with my own, original whisper.