An emotional family drama centered on a young Japanese American who returns to Japan, his childhood home, to reunite with his estranged mother, uncle, and grandmother. Upon arriving, he learns that his beloved grandmother has recently passed away. As he grapples with reconnecting with his family and adapting to the changes in his former home, he must decide whether to hold onto cherished memories or confront the painful reality of the present.

Director Biography - Oliver William Staton

Oliver William Staton is a filmmaker born in Japan and raised in the United States. He comes from an engineering background where he worked for companies including Tesla and General Electric. In 2019, he switched career paths to further develop his skills in writing, directing, and producing. He recently graduated with an MA in Filmmaking from London Film School. His primary interest is rooted in family dramas with cross-cultural struggles with an emphasis on those experienced through an Asian American perspective.

Director Statement

As a Japanese American, my perspective is neither one culture nor the other but rather a tangled hybrid. The search for identity is rooted in who I am. There is beauty in having a diverse heritage, but the flip side of spending time in one place is that it requires not being in the other. Without the renewal of lived experiences, memory can outlive and even overtake reality. "Places We Knew" was created to question the power of memory versus lived experience when forming identity. The film attempts to stir the difficult feeling of loss to a once familiar place.