DIRECTOR’S NOTE
“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”
- Tom Waits
When my dad was in the hospital, his texts weren’t about goodbyes or big life reflections—they were about cinnamon buns. How fast could I get them to him? Did I know the best kind? I go back to those messages a lot, amazed at how something so small could carry so much weight. It was funny and gut-wrenching all at once—kind of like grief itself.
Losing him changed the way I see the world and the way I tell stories. Grief isn’t neat or predictable—it catches you off guard, mixes heartbreak with humor, and somehow, even in the heaviest moments, life keeps throwing you absurd little reminders that you’re still here.
That’s what this film is about. Max, our protagonist, moves through that tangled mess of loss, where the unbearable and the ridiculous live side by side. Where letting go isn’t really an option—you just learn new ways to hold on. If you’ve ever grieved, or if you’re in it now, I hope this story brings some comfort.
MORE ABOUT THE BUNS…
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Magical thinking is the belief that our thoughts, rituals, or symbolic actions can influence events in ways that defy logic or causality—a desperate, deeply human attempt to impose order on the uncontrollable.
Max, our protagonist, does this by bringing the best cinnamon buns to the hospital every single day, as if their warmth and sweetness might anchor her parent to life a little longer. She chooses them carefully, from the bakery that caramelizes the edges just right, keeping a pillowy, buttery dough that melts on the tongue and whose cinnamon-sugar swirls are rich and fragrant, topped with just enough velvety icing to sink into every warm, tender bite-- because maybe this small perfection will tip fate in their favor.
It’s irrational, of course, but grief and love make space for these quiet, stubborn superstitions—the idea that if she just gets it right, if she finds the one cinnamon bun that tastes like staying, her parent might choose to linger.
—Julie Goldstone