Laila Hamdan
Laila Hamdan is a half Palestinian Peruvian film maker from Paterson New Jersey. She loves to make films in the horror and comedy genre. Laila's favorite part of making films is dressing up and doing make up to make her characters come to life. An interesting fact about Laila is that when she watches Pixar’s animated film “The Bee Movie” and SONY’s animated film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball” she can quote it line for line.
Artist Statement
I made Lacrimosa because of a night of passionate writing that came over me out of nowhere. For my Capstone I originally had a concept that was the complete opposite of what Lacrimosa is. The concept was a silly, brightly colored comedy and the concept of Lacrimosa came while I was working on the first concept. After writing the script for Lacrimosa I felt so attached to it because it came out of nowhere. As many of my friends know I tend to follow my gut instincts when it comes to making decisions so when the script of Lacrimosa was finished it ate at me before I changed my Capstone. It was such a gut feeling that I knew that this was the last project I wanted to show the world before I went into the professional field. I hope you, the audience, leave with an understanding of how “little” triggers in a depressed person's life feel. Elena represents how even though there are very traumatic reasons as to why depressed people are the way they are, it is often the “small” things that cause us to slip into our depressive episodes.