The Stories We Don’t Post on Father’s Day: A Filmmaker’s Reflection

This Father’s Day, social media will be full of daddy-daughter and father-son tributes.
Photos of men who’ve passed and are deeply missed and remembered with love.
But it’s the pictures that don’t get posted that scream the loudest—revealing stories you’d rather keep buried.

And then, for some of us, there’s this strange in-between.
Memories that don’t sit neatly in celebration or sorrow.
Not joy. Not rage.
Simply acceptance.

I’ve been sitting with that in-between-ness lately.

Last year, I wrote a post about how—after years of trying to forge a relationship with my father—I finally let it go.

It’s been five years. And it’s incredible how time and doing your work can mend a broken heart.

So, I’ve been reflecting on all of it.
The stories we carry.
The ones we tell.
The ones we still can’t speak without shaking.
And maybe most important, how we tell them.

Because I labored over the words in that post.
My goal was to tell the truth and not villainize him.
That’s why it took almost four years to say or write anything about that moment.

When I wrote My Father the Queen, I was still healing.

I was angry. Confused. Trying to write my way through questions I didn’t have answers to.

There are hard moments in this film. Traumatic ones.

But my director of photography and I already have an understanding of how those scenes will be handled.

And I’ll be one of those directors in the edit, making sure “trauma porn” doesn’t sneak into any scene.

Because we know what pain and grief for profit looks like.

This is not that.

Walter—the father in this story—is layered.

Beautiful. Magnetic. Controlling. Charming. Harmful.

Not a monster. Not a saint.

He’s the kind of man many of us have known and survived.

And we see him through his daughter Kelly’s eyes.

This is her story.

The healing journey is not a detour in this film.
It’s not something that happens after the drama ends.
It is the story.

Some of us still don’t know how to talk about what happened.
And some of us are livid that we have to give ourselves what our fathers couldn’t:
validation, protection, approval.
It seems unfair, but healing requires such.

This film doesn’t offer resolution.
It offers recognition.

We’ve seen it done well.
Queen Sugar gave us grace in grief.
Coogler didn’t show us Smoke’s death in Sinners.
He gave us the reunion instead.

That’s the tradition I’m creating in.
That’s the lineage I honor.

This Father’s Day, I’m thinking about the stories we inherit and the ones we get to rewrite.
I didn’t make this film to retraumatize anyone.
I made it because some of us are ready to heal.
And we deserve to see what that looks like.