The Furthest Distance: Directing The Recipe

This piece is the one of the winners of the Double Exposure 2025-2026 High School Essay Contest.

Homesickness is an illness in my culture. It isn’t just “missing home.” It’s when you miss a person, a moment, or a taste so intensely that your mind and body start tying knots around each other, tighter and tighter. That’s when you understand what the “furthest distance” in the world really is. In 2022, I felt that distance for the first time. 

It hit me in the grocery aisles while staring at bags of frozen Costco dumplings, and in so-called authentic restaurants where the air smelled of industrial grease. That distance became the starting point for my first-ever film script, The Recipe. How funny, because I never cook, but there is one recipe I can recite even backwards if you ask me: dumplings. Every fold of the dough, the exact salinity of the filling, the warmth of the first bite. This memory, inherited from my grandmother, was the sanctuary that I could return to whenever the present felt too cold while navigating my new life in Toronto. 

From Theory to the Tactile 

Before production began, my knowledge of cinema felt academic and, frankly, detached. I understood the "Greats" in a vacuum. I had taken theory classes where terms like Mise-en-scène or Chiaroscuro lighting sounded impressive on paper until you realized how little they actually prepared you for a real set. I worried that my favorite films were just memories, not something I could actually create. 

However, once I stepped behind the monitor, the "theory" became the only tool I had to translate my trauma. To capture the distance between me and my mother—a woman I once feared because of her distance and mystery—I had to move beyond the script. I realized that the unfamiliarity of her image in my memory needed to be translated into the cinematography. We opted for a restricted palette and long-lens shots to create a sense of voyeurism, emphasizing the emotional chasm I felt as a child.

The Technicality of Tenderness 

Filming The Recipe was really a personal experiment in tactile realism. My goal was to use the camera to bridge the gap between the screen and the senses, capturing the textures of my heritage so the audience could feel them as deeply as I do. My central technical challenge was transmuting the mundane into the cinematic: how do you film a dumpling so that it tastes of grief, longing, or love? 

To achieve this, we moved away from traditional clean cinematography and embraced haptic visuality. We utilized macro-cinematography to prioritize the diegetic textures of the scene: the resistance of flour on skin and the rising steam. In terms of lighting design, I avoided a flat, high-key look in favor of a chiaroscuro aesthetic. By employing low-key lighting with a high-contrast ratio, we turned the kitchen into an intimate and claustrophobic space, mirroring the “knots” of homesickness I described in my script. We relied on motivated light sources, specifically allowing harsh afternoon sun to bloom and flare through the window. This intentional lens flare served a theoretical purpose, which created a sense of temporal haziness, simulating the soft-focus and the nature of a fading memory. This blend of high-contrast shadows and nostalgic light allowed the environment to breathe as much as the characters did. 

The Screening: The Final Edit 

As a procrastinating perfectionist, the post-production process was a battle against my own hyper-criticism. I could list the flaws with painful precision, like a jump cut that felt too jarring, a sound bridge that could have been smoother. But during our internal screening, the film stopped belonging to my technical anxieties. 

It belonged to the room. 

I’ve always wanted my work to be emotionally lingering. During that screening, I watched my film, of course, but more importantly, I was watching the audience. Once, I saw the tears from one of my friends–––the silent wiping of her eyes. I realized my experiment with the technique of temporal displacement had landed: a match cut that allows the character to travel back into an earlier scene, merging the present-day kitchen to the kitchen of her childhood. At that moment, the distance I had felt since 2022 finally closed. I realized that my background–––my fear of my mother back then, my longing for my grandmother–––wasn't simply a story that I wanted to share, but a foundation of my voice that drove me to pick up a camera in the first place. My time in the classroom prepared me with the tools and theories, but the set taught me how to use them to finally untie the knots of my homesickness. 

I made something real with people I was grateful for, for people I cared about. For the first time in years, it was enough to finally breathe.

Cici Xu is a Toronto-based creator born in China and raised in Canada. Her work explores the intersections of culture and identity, aiming to empower communities through storytelling. By navigating the city through her own lens and words, she seeks to capture fleeting memories and find her place within a diverse human landscape.

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