A Screenplay
Still Water
Soft Bones
Logline
After years away in Los Angeles, Sahsha returns to upstate New York to help care for her grandmother. And finds the distance she built between herself and the truth beginning to close.
Synopsis
After years away in Los Angeles, Sahsha returns to upstate New York to help care for her grandmother. Reentering a home shaped by love, silence, and unfinished conversations, she finds herself navigating the fragile dynamics between her mother Deena and her sister Aaliyah while confronting the truths she has long kept hidden about her life away.
Through quiet moments with her grandmother Nan and the support of a small local community, Sahsha begins to risk a new kind of honesty. When unexpected news of an acting role arrives under her own name, joy and grief collide, inviting her to step fully into the life she has been quietly fighting to claim.
An intimate meditation on family, inheritance, and the courage it takes to remain present and be seen.
Characters
Sahsha
The eldest daughter, returned from Los Angeles. An aspiring actress carrying the weight of secrets and the quiet hope of being truly seen. She moves through the house like someone relearning the language of home.
Nan
The grandmother, the still center of the family. Quiet, but not diminished. Her presence holds the house together even as time asks more of her. She sees what others cannot say.
Deena
Sahsha's mother. A woman shaped by duty and silence, whose love expresses itself in the things she does rather than the words she speaks. The distance between her and her daughters is measured in unfinished sentences.
Aaliyah
Sahsha's younger sister. She stayed. That single fact contains multitudes: resentment, loyalty, love, and a quiet pride she rarely lets show.
Themes
Homecoming & Belonging
What does it mean to return to a place that shaped you, only to find that both you and it have changed? The film explores the ache of re-entry, the negotiation between who you were and who you've become.
Grief as Presence
Nan's journey is not an event but a season. The film sits with anticipatory grief, the way loss begins long before departure, and how tending to someone in their most tender chapter can become an act of profound intimacy.
The Courage of Visibility
Sahsha's journey is ultimately about the risk of being seen. Fully, honestly, without the armor of distance or performance. The film asks: what becomes possible when we stop hiding?
Inheritance
Not just what is passed down, but what is absorbed. Patterns of silence, expressions of love, the unspoken agreements that hold a family together and keep it apart.
Writer's Statement
I began writing Still Water Soft Bones while thinking about the quiet ways people learn to survive. Not the dramatic moments that are easy to recognize as struggle, but the smaller adjustments that happen slowly over time. The ways we edit ourselves in certain rooms. The ways we carry truths that feel too complicated to explain to the people who love us.
Sahsha's story grew from that space. She is someone who has learned how to move carefully through the world, revealing only the parts of herself that feel safe. Returning home to care for her grandmother brings her back into a family dynamic shaped by years of love, silence, and unspoken understanding. The house holds memory. Old roles begin to reappear. And yet, within those familiar walls, something begins to shift.
At the center of the film is Nan, Sahsha's grandmother, who carries the calm clarity that sometimes comes at the end of a long life. Nan does not demand explanations or confession. Instead, she recognizes Sahsha for who she is without hesitation. In doing so, she creates the possibility for Sahsha to stop performing survival and simply be present.
I was interested in telling a story where transformation does not arrive through confrontation or spectacle, but through attention. Through listening. Through the accumulation of small moments that allow someone to feel witnessed.
The film moves through spaces that are both intimate and ordinary: a hospital room, a family kitchen, a quiet bedroom at night. These are places where grief and joy often sit side by side. In that environment Sahsha begins to understand that becoming visible is not a single decision but a process.
Still Water Soft Bones is ultimately about inheritance. Not only the inheritance of grief, but the inheritance of resilience and care that moves through generations. It asks how we carry the people who shaped us forward, and how their love can create space for us to live more honestly in the world.
About the Writer
Sunshine Sunni Shabaz
Sunshine Sunni Shabaz is a writer, performer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the emotional landscapes of family. Her storytelling is rooted in intimate character driven narratives that examine the quiet ways people learn to survive and the courage it takes to become visible. Drawing from personal experience and the communities that shaped her, Shabaz creates stories that center tenderness, resilience, and chosen family. Still Water Soft Bones is her debut feature screenplay and reflects her commitment to telling deeply human stories that exist at the intersection of vulnerability and strength.
Project Details
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