An Interview with “Ebb + Flow” Filmmaker Kaitlyn Sookdeo

This is clearly a very personal project about family and legacy. What was your initial process of developing a film from those themes like?

With Ebb + Flow, I drew from a few real-life inspirations and dramatized them further within the story in the film. I've had a few family members whose ashes were spread both in the States and in the Caribbean, and I also named the protagonist after my late grandmother. The very immediate level of honoring those who are no longer with us starts with them, but I began to think further back to my ancestors that came from India to Trinidad & Tobago due to British Indentured Servitude. There's a lack of accessible records to those who came to Trinidad, and it's likely that not everyone on the boat made it through the journey across the ocean. So even though more recent relatives had their ashes spread in the ocean, I had a point in my development process where I knew Ebb + Flow had to also honor the ancestors that I will never know the names of.

What value do you think there is in exploring these ideas through spoken word and poetic imagery rather than a narrative film?

Using that vivid imagery was one of the first things that I knew I wanted to incorporate into Ebb + Flow. On my last trip to Trinidad, my family and I woke up early to watch the sunrise. It's a pretty universal image, and the contrast of a warm sky and bright blue water always creates a striking image. But of course, the layering of spoken narration on top of that beautiful scenery helps the film be more personal. Though the narration has fictional elements in it, at its core, the themes are personal not only to me, but to many people with ancestry in the West Indies. 

What is it about the symbolism of water that interests you?

It's a little funny, but I'm actually scared of the ocean, which is ironically why it was my ideal setting. The ocean is very mysterious, and it lends itself to the suspension of disbelief needed to think that ashes and the general idea of culture can travel across the world and across oceans. The ocean also has this liveliness to it that I really enjoy. Its movement and personality can be aggressive or calming or somewhere in between, which is why I wanted to use those big morning waves to represent each of the ancestors. 

As a microbudget filmmaker, how do you go about embracing your limitations?

Because this project was so personal, I focused on having a smaller crew made up of my friends. Many of my friends have their own equipment and were comfortable with bringing it to the beach. I also aimed to keep the film short and simple. It helped with the amount of filming days under the limited sunrise time. It also meant that it was a great amount of time to stay on the beach without the visuals getting stale, which saved us from any additional costs or logistics involved with another location. A lot of Ebb + Flow was based in what I already had access to, and trusting that my small crew and I could fill in any gaps that we were missing. 

What do you hope to do next? (Any themes you want to continue exploring, genres you want to work in, mediums you want to experiment with? etc...)

I love TV and most of my writing recently has been TV pilots. Ebb + Flow was a new experience for me, both in genre and topic, but it was interesting to incorporate some Caribbean culture into a project for the first time. In the future, I'd like to continue implementing elements of that, along with the different intersectionalities that come along with it.