Director's Statement . Lee Isaac Chung
I marvel at the absurdity of memory, the haphazard assortment of souvenirs retained as time passes mercilessly. I remember very little of my first trip to the ocean, for instance, while the ticking of a clock in my grandmother's room remains very clear to me. Epiphany is the rare event in which even the most negligible memories combine to resonate a new meaning like the arrival of a wild guest.

I created LUCKY LIFE out of a longing for such clarity, straying from traditional narrative devices and wishing to reflect the processes of memory and lived experience. This meant that the production itself should be organic. We filmed on the beaches of North Carolina while two tropical storms passed, and every production day was an improvised response and adaptation to nature. We worked with an informal script for most scenes and relied on available light to dictate camera placement and framing.

Samuel Anderson and I wrote and prepared the film during a time in which we each experienced personal tragedies. I found some shelter in reading poetry, the most important being Gerald Stern’s 1977 collection, Lucky Life, for which this film is named. Stern himself is the collector of epiphanies, a scavenger of memories and everyday occurrences that others would abandon – he redeems what is lost to forgetting and leads us to the hallowed words, “O lucky, lucky life.” Should redemption for the world come, poets of memory will ring its church bells.