GRIEF RARELY ARRIVES AS A SINGLE MOMENT.

It arrives as a route. A list of addresses. A sequence of places someone else once called home, handed over after the fact by a person who is no longer there to explain them. That idea sits at the centre of How Does It Feel to Be This Close to Home? – an independent feature currently moving towards production, and a project we're proud to be part of.

The story follows Sam Hennessy as she processes the death of her estranged father and discovers that he has left her a trail of memories. Travelling to the places that shaped his life, she scatters his ashes across a history she was never let into, searching for a connection she couldn't find while he was alive.

It's an intimate road drama about the relationships we inherit after loss.

ONE DAY, ONE FARM.

Constrained by one location, a small crew and a fixed amount of daylight to work in, what the farm offered was space – open ground, long sightlines, and a horizon that puts a single figure in proportion. For a story about someone travelling towards a person she can't reach, this became useful in a practical sense: you can hold a wide shot and let the distance do the work rather than cutting to explain it.

It also offered usable sound. Rural quiet isn't silence; there's wind, birds, machinery somewhere out of frame, but it's clean enough to record against, which matters in a film where one of the central characters exists only as a voice. The father is present as sound and never as an image. It's a simple device that puts the audience in the same position as Sam. You hear him. You don't get to see him. You're always slightly too late.

WHY PROOF OF CONCEPT?

A proof-of-concept short isn't a trailer, and it isn't a shorter version of the feature.

It exists to demonstrate that a tone can be sustained – that a quiet, intimate film about inheritance and absence can hold attention without raising its voice. Financiers, distributors and collaborators can read a script and imagine several different films inside it, while a proof of concept helps narrow that down to one. It also tests the difficult things early. Whether the pacing works when little is explained. Whether an audience can sit with ambiguity.

WHERE THE FEATURE GOES

The full film widens out across the places on the list, each one a different chapter in a life Sam is only now being allowed to read. Financing is progressing, the post-production house from the short is confirmed for the feature, and the project is building towards production with the same team that brought the proof of concept to light.

At Oasis Studios, we're drawn to stories that stay close to their subject rather than explaining it from a distance. Films about loss can be tempted into grand statements. This one is more interested in a car, a map, an urn and the long silences in between, all of which tell the story of a journey towards a person you’re only allowed to meet once they’re gone.