The Things We Keep screens at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
When Kate (Rebecca Holopter) receives word her estranged mother (Jenny O’Hara) is unable to take care of herself, she reluctantly returns to pack up her mom’s house and send her to a nursing home. Unfortunately, it’s a big task: her mother has been a hoarder for as long as Kate can remember. As she cleans, her mother warns: bad things will happen if you take away my things. Kate battles her mother’s dementia-driven hostility and uncovers disturbing items underneath the detritus. Specifically: a sinister-looking mold-like mark underneath the wallpaper. As Kate unravels the mystery of her mother’s obsession and illness, she discovers that the hoarding was self-preservation. There is evil in the house’s walls, and they must be covered at all costs. An allegorical tale of intergenerational trauma between mothers and daughters.
In attendance at Sundance was Joanna Fernandez (Writer/Director); Rebecca Holopter (Cast, “Kate”); Yaxing Lin (Producer); Lilith Mo (Producer); Marie Lessel (Editor); and Andrea Riba, Sofia Riba, Hassan Al-Jahni, and Anne Cofell Saunders (Executive Producers).
Director/Writer Joanna Fernandez is a genre writer and director with a BFA from NYU and an MFA from USC, where she earned the Jeffrey Jones Award and Fox Fellowship. Her film SERAPHIM won the Jury Award at the 2023 Austin Film Festival, showcasing her focus on myth, morality, monsters, and scapegoats.
Fernandez says, “Fairytales and myths have long been a tool for people to deal with the horrors that plagued them. Horror, at its best, uses the genre to tackle human drama and conflict. I would like to express my truth using this lens and create a powerful narrative about the nature of intergenerational trauma and motherhood.”
