Mama’s Hands is a film that documents the impossibility of undoing, of truly moving backwards. In it, my mother carefully takes apart her blouse, unpicking every stitch, removing each button, and laying the fabric out flat, returning it to its original pattern. It is a cathartic act; an attempt to reverse time and to undo what has already been lived. But the blouse does not return to its past state. Instead, it is broken, its fabric fragile and full of tiny holes where the thread once held it together. The act of unmaking leaves its own trace, a quiet evidence of what had previously been.

I once read a passage once about processing trauma through imagining the world in reverse, where loss gives way to simplicity. In it was the line: "Mothers who had lost their children mended their clothes with scissors." This film holds that same paradox, where the act of undoing is itself a form of rupture, a tender but futile attempt to restore what cannot be restored, but, perhaps, also the catharsis of coming full circle.