Creating “Home”: A journey of perseverance, learning, and improvement.
The prompt? You can’t go home again. The prop? A ticket.
The catch? 48 hours.
In the final week of October 2025, I created what I’d consider the most meaningful film I’ve crafted to date. Home. It was made for Zoomfest 2025, a 48-hour film competition which I’ve participated in for the past two years. But this year felt different.
Two weeks before Zoomfest, I travelled to New York City with my longtime collaborator and director, Michael Xu, to attend the All-American High School Film Festival, where our previous outing, One Last Meal, screened at AMC Times Square.
Going in, I thought we had something special, unique and bold. We had a sharp, witty film with quick edits and clever humour. But when I sat in that theatre, surrounded by filmmakers from around the world, my jaw dropped. I realized I was just a drop in a puddle. The sheer creativity, effort, resources, and emotional depth of the films I watched left me humbled.
One film that’s still etched in my mind was Why Can’t We Just Be Ghosts? by Patrick Jang, a brilliant metaphor for invisibility and isolation, told through a friend who can’t speak and wears a ghost costume. Its emotional depth, masterful editing, acting, and direction made me deeply understand about how much power a simple idea can hold when it’s told with sincerity.
That realization stayed with me long after I left New York, and when Zoomfest came around, it shaped how I approached Home.
So when Zoomfest began, we decided to take a completely different route from our previous projects. No dystopian worlds (Loyalty Check), no exaggerated plotlines (One Last Meal), just something real. Something quiet, yet so loud.
The theme was You Can’t Go Home Again, and the prop was a ticket.
Get Nik’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Fifteen minutes after the prompts dropped, Michael pitched a simple but powerful concept: a young immigrant who tries to visit his sick mother back home. It was a story rooted in reality, a story I could see, feel, and connect to. It was an instant hit among the team, winning by unanimous vote, and both Michael and I began to further this story, trying to make it dramatic and impactful, while still staying true to the roots of the story.
Playing this character was one of the hardest yet most rewarding experiences I’ve had. I really wanted to represent the immigrant community here in Surrey, who are primarily of South Asian nationality. Being of Tamil descent, I felt that it would be really impactful to convey the story through a Tamil lens. I worked closely with Michael to ensure the story was authentic and respectful. I reinterpreted the English dialogue into Tamil, making it sound natural and real, not performative. Every line had to feel lived-in, not written.
Filming was brutal. We only had one day to film a countless number of shots, with practically no time at all to rest. But somehow, somewhere, something about this project clicked. We were a small team of four (a drastic reduction from last year’s team of 7), efficient and determined.
Michael’s direction this time was sharper than ever. We were able to use a Sony a7R III camera, a huge step forward from the Canon 60D cameras we are required to use for school projects. The Sony, along with a new shotgun mic Michael had purchased before Zoomfest, made filming much, much easier and efficient. This meant that we no longer needed to get a separate audio input and sync the audio and video clips for each shot. He also made the decision to use an adjustable lens (zoomable?) rather than carrying around three different lenses (35, 50, and 85mm) everywhere (like we are required to use for school projects).
We intentionally decided to only show my face, focusing on the struggle and personal stakes of the story. Knowing that I was the only subject, it was much harder to act under that pressure, but it brought out something raw in me, something that reminded me why I love performing.
By the time we reached editing day, exhaustion had set in. We were debating over everything as a team, with all of us having our own opinions. I hesitated at first that the music might be too dramatic for such a quiet story, but Michael reminded me that even ordinary lives have cinematic moments. And he was right.
When we finally watched the finished film, I realized what we had made. Home wasn’t just about an immigrant’s struggle. It was about longing, sacrifice, and the quiet strength of those who keep going.
In just 48 hours, we had created something that had deeper meaning and cinematic value than any of our other films.
And for me, it wasn’t just another role. It was the moment I stopped trying to perform and started trying to feel.
You can watch the film below or here.
