Sometimes I Imagine Your Funeral
2025 · 11m · USA
Directed by Vince Dixon
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Minutes before his sister Chloe's funeral, Max struggles to write her eulogy, wrestling with the anger, guilt and grief of losing her to an overdose while trying to decide who she really was to him. Drawn from writer-director Vince Dixon's own unsent letter to his sister Lauren, who died of an overdose in 2021.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is genuinely gutsy—a director casting himself as his own grief, essentially performing the letter he couldn't send—but the execution plays it too safe, leaning into expected beats of loss rather than interrogating why he needed to make this at all.
Dixon's formal restraint here—the contained space, the unfinished eulogy as frame—situates itself in a lineage of intimate grief cinema, though it risks becoming a well-intentioned personal document rather than a work that transforms its source material into something architecturally necessary.
The decision to have Dixon perform his own barely-fictionalized trauma could've been maudlin, but something about the way he holds the silence before speaking—the spaces where emotion *isn't* performed—makes the whole thing breathe; it's a choice that redeems what could've been self-indulgent.
Reviews
Sheds light on what it feels like to be adjacent to addiction — to capture on-screen all the complicated emotions you feel when your loved one is battling addiction.
A Fishers native's film focuses on his sister's battle with addiction — a personal story told with unflinching tenderness.
Festivals
- Anchorage International Film Festival 2025