“I always knew I wanted to be a filmmaker,” said Joanna Fernandez, writer and director of “The Things we Keep,” a short film that explores the deepest corners of the mind.
While in her MFA program at USC, Fernandez received the “Jeffrey Jones Award for Excellence in Writing.” Her MFA horror thesis, “The Things We Keep,” has earned her the Fox Fellowship Endowment and a premiere at 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
The film’s premiere held on Sunday night was part of the “Midnight Short Film Program,” which traditionally screens a curated selection of horror genre short films.
Fernandez said she sees the horror genre as an exploration of people’s anxieties.
“It’s not necessarily positive but it’s an outlet for that,” she said. “And I think people have been doing that since the dawn of time. That’s what folktales and fables are, just people’s anxieties being funneled into cautionary tales. I love that genre is a way to explore topics without being super on the nose or preachy. … It’s just a really fun playground for all that stuff.”
“The Things We Keep” tells a story of Kate, a woman who finds herself in a caretaker position when her mother with hoarder tendencies develops greater symptoms of Alzheimer’s. In Kate’s attempt to help her mom she finds herself overwhelmed with the renewed memories of her traumas, and she discovers an eerie reality of the house and what it hides within its walls.
“The monster in my film is a manifestation of a lot of things that people deal with that they try to shove behind a wall, into a closet,” said Fernandez. “In this film, it very much symbolizes intergenerational trauma that’s shared between mother and daughter, and presumably her mother’s mother. It’s all these nasty things that we inherit, that we don’t really know what to deal with, that we try to escape and we want to think that we can deal with, but it’s always going to be lurking there.”
The elements of the film provide a place for the mind to wander and pull meaning from each viewer’s personal experience, and for Fernandez, “The Things We Keep” draws on facts from her personal life, such as the relationship with her mother and her mother’s own diagnosis with early-onset Alzheimer’s.
In the film, Kate has a sense of feeling trapped, explained Fernandez.
“For the character, the objective in the film is that she’s going to pack up her mom and then she’s going to get out of there and be like, ‘OK, my job is done, I’m out.’ But there’s a million ways she could have gone about helping her mom without putting herself into the thick of it,” said Fernandez. “It’s almost like using your family shit as an excuse to get bogged down, … finding yourself dragged back to where you started. I think it’s really difficult to mentally escape your trauma in a way. Like, proximity is all well and good, but once you’re back in, it’s really easy to fall into the same patterns.”
While working on the project, Fernandez found herself moved to find more empathy towards her mother, knowing that she had her own hardships that shaped her parent-to-child dynamic.
“There’s definitely a huge catharsis element for filmmaking and also watching,” said Fernandez, explaining that for every person there is something in different styles of film that satisfies something within them.
“I think everybody has a story to tell,” she said. “We’ve been spoon fed a very specific type of story for so long, and now I’m so excited that there’s this mass renaissance of so many different types of stories, from so many different cultures and I’m really excited for the next generations.”
‘Midnight Short Films Program’ in-person screenings
- 10:20 a.m., Jan. 28, Megaplex Redstone-3 (open caption)
- 8:50 p.m., Jan. 30, Megaplex Redstone-3
- 9:30 p.m., Jan. 31, Broadway Centre Cinemas-6, Salt Lake City
Online
- 8 a.m., Jan. 30. – 4:55 a.m., Feb. 3.