Director’s Statement

I’m Nande Walters, a filmmaker, artist, and aspiring archivist working on my senior thesis film for Pratt Institute. As a child to parents from the Caribbean, my life mirrors those of my childhood friends in South Florida and the friends I’ve made since moving to New York. My thesis focuses on the Caribbean diaspora while representing universal experiences of migration. I use this film to question what home means to me, what grief means to me, and what legacy I can leave behind as an artist and an archivist.

Through a year of critically thinking about what I want this film to be about, I’ve grieved in countless ways while learning to accept that I can’t make a film about everything because I’ll never know everything. My process has been about uncovering what’s meaningful to me, and since being in Jamaica, I’ve felt a certainty in being uncertain. I feel gratitude for not being alone in my artistic process and creating an archive for my family.

My feelings are best described through writings during my trip, especially those about my grandmother, inherited anxiety, loneliness, and distance. My relationship with her is a result of the diasporic displacement I’ve been grappling with since entering adulthood. The symbol of lines, physical and metaphorical, has guided me since starting this project in 2019. Creating a comprehensive history of my family is a project I could spend my whole life working on. But Soon Come Back focuses on my present experience and my existential relationships between Florida and Jamaica.