Still Sailing
A ten-year-old with a hyperactive imagination refuses to believe his father died in a sailing accident — and secretly uses a family cruise to hunt for proof that he's still out there.
Reggie, 10, hasn't accepted that his father is gone. When a sailing accident takes him, the official story doesn't sit right with Reggie's imagination — there's no body, no proof, nothing that couldn't just be a very long disappearance.
When his mother books them on a cruise meant to help them both process the loss, Reggie sees an opportunity instead: a boat, an ocean, and a chance to run his own investigation. Armed with a notebook, a wild theory, and total confidence in his own detective instincts, he starts working every deck, every crew member, and every stray clue toward proof his father is still sailing somewhere out there.
As the trip goes on, Reggie's search collides with his mother's very different way of grieving — and Reggie has to find his way to a version of the truth he can actually hold, without losing the parts of his imagination that got him through the worst of it.
Still Sailing is about how kids grieve differently than adults do — sideways, through stories and games and investigations, because the direct route is too much to look at head-on.
I wanted to write a film that takes a child's magical thinking seriously, right up until the moment it can't protect him anymore — and to find the tenderness in that turn, rather than treating it as a lesson to be delivered.