FILMMAKER’S STATEMENT

BELIEF is a 14min film that tributes the transcendent power of a mother’s love—and the quiet, often invisible ways that love shapes a life.

The script was written 12 years ago for my wife, Erika Hamilton, when she was pregnant with our first child months before that awe-inspiring leap into motherhood. It came with the realization that, in ways we could not yet understand, the smallest things we said and did might become part of the person our child would one day become. I shared the script with her, we had a child and then another. In short, we got on with life.

Ten years later, our family had lived with the experience of learning challenges and we found ourselves remembering the script conceived before our children were born. In that moment, we realized that our children were now old enough to play its central roles alongside their mother. In an unexpected case of life imitating art, the story we had once imagined had begun to echo our own.

I believe the performances carry a deeper resonance because of that authentic bond. Erika wasn’t simply playing Lennox’s mother; she was playing a mother alongside her own children. And our children weren’t simply acting—they were bringing an understanding of their mother’s love that existed long before the cameras rolled.

What began as a film about motherhood became something more personal: a kind of mission statement for our family, and a reminder that a child’s path cannot always be measured by the expectations we begin with.

The challenge we faced in telling this story was distilling down all of the key contributing elements a mother gives her child. The language we developed to tell this story seeds a bunch of (seemingly) disparate and unexplained moments early in the film and as the story progresses, lets the viewer connect the dots on all the decisions that shaped her son, Lennox.

This approach paralleled my own mother’s lessons gathered from seemingly innocuous moments. Including moment’s where my own mother flat out rejected the prevailing voice of the time.

Perhaps that is what a mother’s belief ultimately is. It is not certainty. It is the decision to see something in your child that may not yet be visible to anyone else—and to keep seeing it, especially when the world tells you not to.

BELIEF is my tribute to that kind of love: quiet, defiant, unconditional, and, against all odds, transcendent.