Cat’s Tale is made up of an open letter from me (accompanying 16mm and 8mm footage), and verité footage of my mom’s return trip to Cambodia. The letter moves between the internal space of my mom on her journey and essayistic reflections from my own experiences in Cambodia and being my mother’s daughter. Moving from vignette to vignette, the film visits different moments in family time, history, and memory; moving through an intergenerational conversation between the voices of daughter and mother, spiraling around the silences, mis/translations, mis/interpretations, and the changing meaning of stories in the context of going to/leaving home. 

Director's Bio: Em Butler is a writer, filmmaker and community organizer from Long Beach, California. Of Cambodian-English heritage and as a first-generation Khmer-American, her documentary and journalism work broadly center Southeast Asia and the potential for multigenerational storytelling to push forward anti-imperialist movements. Her research approaches are situated between documentary, autoethnography, journalism, and performative fiction. To deepen her personal and political work, embarked on a journey to learn Khmer this summer through the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute, while continuing to organize with Liyang Network; she eventually plans on joining community schools and farmer organizations in rural Cambodia.