BROTHER follows a nine-year-old girl named Sadie as she begins to discover her older brother’s opioid addiction on a family road trip. I wrote this film because I’m interested in how children try to make sense of a loved one’s struggle, and the innocent and oftentimes improbable belief that they can save someone from it. BROTHER lives in the small details of a child’s perspective, showing how a family’s hardship sometimes exists in the periphery, just past a home video’s camera frame.

I grew up taking family road trips from Texas to New Mexico. I still remember the hours spent as a kid staring out the car window, watching as the Texas plains slowly gave way to the desert, and how the bright sunlight would shift into a soft pink horizon. I chose this landscape because in the vastness of a desert, there is often nowhere else to look but at the people beside you. It’s in this open space that Sadie’s family is forced to confront Colton’s struggle and see the truth of what he’s navigating.

At the end of the film, Sadie makes a complicated decision. I wrote this because sometimes hope has baggage. They say that when someone struggles with addiction, you need to accept that they may never change. I believe that’s true, but BROTHER touches on a different truth: This is a story about a little sister who simply wants to bring her big brother home.