Still Waters (2025)

A brief moment in the life of a young queer couple trying to navigate their relationship two years after the loss of their little girl who accidentally drowned in their swimming pool.

The most terrifying thought for a parent is the loss of their child, especially when it is a challenge to have a child in the first place. Feelings of unfairness, despair, guilt take over and consume entirely. All the more when an accident happens. This is what this mother Gabrielle and her wife Raquel have to navigate in the short film Still Waters, adapted from a play by the same title.

In this huis clos, we bear witness like a fly on the wall, to the heightened raw emotions of Gabrielle and Raquel, shaken to their core. We are dragged into the intimacy of this couple, playing the blame game. In the end, will their relationship survive this tragedy?

Director - Katia Cafe-Febrissy

Director - Katia Cafe-Febrissy

Director Biography - Katia Cafe-Febrissy

An award-winning filmmaker, director, producer and playwright based in Toronto, Ontario. Coming from the worlds of documentary and theatre, with her very first narrative short film STILL WATERS, Katia pushes the boundaries of her storytelling repertoire.

Through her body of work rooted in emotional realism, Katia brings us into her world as she sees and feels it, where she lets her poetic streaks bleed into her visual aesthetics. With STILL WATERS, her goal is to foster candid conversations around the difficult topic of loss and grief, and its impact on a relationship.

Katia is a member of the Directors Guild of Canada, she holds a Masters in Documentary filmmaking from the Varan Doc Film Centre, France as well as a Masters in Languages and Literature from the Université Paris VIII, France.

Director Statement

It all started with an assignment in my acting class--I had to choose a monologue to perform. I opted for an excerpt of STILL WATERS, the play. I was so moved by the story that I reached out to the playwright, Arthur M. Jolly, because I wanted to know more. When I read the entire play, I fell in love with the rawness of the story so I boldly told Arthur that I wanted to adapt his play into a short film. He agreed and my journey into narrative storytelling began.

STILL WATERS sits at the crossroads of several themes that were important to me as well as my producing partner. They are queer and I am a mother so this story was a way for us to offer our POV on the contemporary society we live in. In addition to loss and grief, we wanted to explore female queerness, motherhood, mental health and relationships in a way we had not often seen on screen before.

From a directorial standpoint, I had no interest in showing the events that caused the trauma, that is the accidental drowning of a toddler in the swimming pool. Instead, I chose to represent the death of the child metaphorically with a little plush toy and focus on the relationship dynamic between Gabrielle and Raquel. I wanted to delve into how past trauma, which only lives in the present, can affect individuals and impact a relationship.

That’s why, in the editing suite, I made a point of selecting the takes where the performances were the rawest. For instance, the takes when the characters speak at each other and over each other because this is how arguments happen in real life. My through line is separation in togetherness, so we chose a location that allowed us to embody that divide visually.