There’s a lot going on the world right now that can’t be summed up in a single social media post. Horrific genocide, world recession and job loss, irreparable climate change—and through it all, our personal lives don’t stop. What’s common amongst all happenings is a throughline of grief, and that’s where our conversation with Vancouver-based filmmaker Rosie Choo Pidcock begins. 

Loose Lips Magazine caught up with Choo Pidcock to talk about their upcoming film, Sorry For Your Cost, and why it’s so important to create stories around our own grief. 

Loose Lips: Sorry For Your Cost tells the story of a working class Asian family coming to terms with the predatory nature of the funeral industry, and ultimately finding solace in their own rituals—tell me a little more about what inspired this story and why you had to tell it.

Rosie Choo Pidcock: For me, it was planning my mom’s funeral, and the moment that I was pitched an oil painting replica of her that was, you know, several thousands of dollars, in a very serious and sincere way. I just was like, ‘No, that’s not what I’m interested in right now.’ It just felt so surreal. I’m not here to judge what everyone needs in their grief. I think that’s the point— it’s intended to be personal. Just, for me, it was just so wildly far from anything that me or my family were seeking at that moment. 

And that led me to research, there’s an article in the Washington Post [where they estimate] that there were about 10,000 bodies that were abandoned in 2021, because [families] couldn’t afford the funeral, or there was no next of kin…. That really drove me to think, “Okay, what if this family is in this position where they are not able to pay for last rites? What did they do?” Coming from a working-class immigrant perspective, where the person doesn’t want you to spend that money, they’d rather you keep it for yourself and do something useful with it [like] pay for your education, but the shame that that would bring on—how do you overcome leaving behind the physical body of someone that you love? So that’s kind of where I started. And then I wove in the main character who wants to be an actor. She gets accepted to theater school, and her mom dies the day she gets in. [The choice she is given is to] choose between going to school and pursuing this dream or leaving her mom behind.

I became fascinated by how funeral homes financially exploit the grief of people right after they’ve lost someone. I also reflected on the immense privilege required to even host a funeral which costs on average $10,000 in Vancouver for an open casket viewing plus cremation and ceremony. This inspired me to write a story about a family fighting for dignity in the process of death, and ultimately finding it in themselves by doing the funeral their own way.

LL: I find that there’s also kind of a tax on doing things in a ritualistic way. For example, devout Catholics often believe you must be buried, not cremated—and so that’s a much higher price tag. Can you speak to those traditions a little bit, about what your family wanted versus what you settled on, in the end?

RCP: My mom, I think, grew up with some Buddhist traditions being Chinese from Singapore. But then she adopted Christianity as her faith when she moved to Canada. And she was very much in her church community that were Chinese Christians. I guess I felt so lost when all this was happening. I mean, I lost my mom in a very sudden manner. She took her own life. Trying to navigate through all of this and feeling like “oh, my gosh, are there some Chinese things that I should be doing?” And there’s the shame of not knowing what that was because we’re never prepared for this moment. I think she requested to be cremated, and I don’t know if that was driven culturally or religiously. But she had requested to be cremated. And so we did that but still doing a legal cremation is very expensive. All told, funeral costs, with the open casket viewing us, was about $10,000 and then to actually inter ashes in the cemetery was like another $5,000. That’s $15,000.

All of these decisions are so personal [and in the end] we decided we wanted her to have a final resting place. And in Chinese culture, tomb sweeping is a holiday in Mainland China where I used to live. Every year, you go and sweep the tombs of your ancestors, and you offer fruit and incense, and money. So for us, it was very important that you have a resting place that everyone could go to.

LL: “Grief as Storytelling” is an umbrella topic that you came up with, sort of based on how everyone is feeling in the world right now. Can you tell me why this overall theme appeals to you, and maybe why we need to connect to each other through our grief stories?

RCP: I think I really gave [my grief] the chance to blossom and expand and be an ongoing practice, instead of a one-time thing that I got over and went back to my regular life. I think grief is like a fire that we tend to. Because that way of looking at it, it’s acknowledging that the people who we lost will have an impact on us. 

I lost my mom in my late twenties before most people have gone through a loss. In a strange way, I do feel like the pandemic allowed regular people a sense of what it was like to lose the life they thought they were going to have during that time: they were going to have their wedding, go to Coachella—whatever it was, we all, in some way saw a shift. I actually, in a strange way, felt a bit less alone during the pandemic, because I felt like people now could relate on this level of grief and loss.

I think that that’s why I’ve found grief to be very powerful as a mode of storytelling. Many crew members and cast members have shared with me, “Oh, I have found this project, Sorry For Your Cost, to be a healing process.” I think if I can extend that kind of grieving safe space to people, when they’re coming to a project as a cast or crew member, it allows for that healing, and then that continued lens that other people are going to take into the world and hopefully shine on their own projects.

LL: This isn’t the first film that deals with your mother’s legacy, as Esther & Sai also details her story of meeting her best friend in nursing school in the 1970s. I think it’s beautiful that you keep writing these love letters to her… do you want to talk a bit more about that?

Esther & Sai is specifically about my mom and her best friend. Because my mom is Sai, the film’s about my mom, the person. But [Sorry For Your Cost] is inspired by the experience of planning the funeral… I would say it’s more about, how do we choose our own paths with grief that feels right for us? And really, how do we make art in a world where it costs money to be an artist? The longer I work as an actor, the more I realize you have to have a certain level of privilege. 

I wasn’t interested in the portrayal of a Chinese family that was like typical Tiger parents: be a doctor, be a lawyer. This family loves their daughter and wants her to pursue art, but the tragedy is not that the parents don’t support her. The tragedy is that a freak accident causes them to lose everything they’ve saved, it makes you poor and jeopardizes your future. And that’s just reality for people that don’t have a safety net. Particularly in a place like Vancouver, where it’s increasingly expensive to support yourself. You’ve got to work three, four jobs just stay afloat. 

I would say the film was about those two things: finding your own version of grief and the question: “Who has the privilege of making art and being an artist?”

Sorry For Your Cost is currently fundraising for post-production with a crowdfunding campaign. Check out their Seed & Spark page, and pledge now!

Watch the pitch here!