Old California

2026–Present

My grandmother is more than one hundred years old and has lived in California's Central Valley for most of her life. My mother grew up in the same house. My sister lives in the same town now. I am the youngest of four generations of women connected to that place, who lives 3000 miles away and the one with the camera.

I return because I'm trying to understand what passes between women that isn't visible. Not our faces, but our ways of caring for one another. Our humor. Our resilience. The quiet work of holding a family together. Some of these things are taught. Others are simply absorbed by living alongside one another.

Rooted in the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, Old California uses one family's story to look at what it means to grow very old in America. It asks: How does a way of caring move from one woman to the next? What disappears when the oldest woman in a family is no longer here to remember?