Tribeca Film Festival ‘25 — Honeyjoon, Drowning with My Mother

Image Credit: Tribeca Film Festival

I finished watching Honeyjoon (2025) in a hotel room at 4 pm through Tribeca’s online press screener after a long day of walking through Kyoto’s Gion District. My mother is sitting across the room from me, half-asleep and half-studying Spanish on Duolingo on her shikibuton. My back aches from the kimono that we wore to the Shinto temples in the Gion district. My stomach carries the lines from the several different ties pressing cloth into my skin. Tomorrow, we are going to Kobe — where my mother’s side of the family first landed from their boat fleeing Vietnam. And I can not fathom how my mother seems to only be concerned with her Spanish.

The older I get, the more I don’t tell my mother and the more I know she will never tell me. I have yet to show her an article that I have written or a film I have made. I think they are too personal. She has yet to tell me that she thinks I am a bad person. People tell us that we are alike. And I feel every time that I am looking at a stranger that I know too much about. The divide across a generation can often feel like one of the hardest to navigate, and it’s a gap that only seems to widen when it’s a mother and daughter standing face to face with each other — trying to talk to each other. Lilian T. Mehrel places this gap between Lela and June, at the very center of Honeyjoon.

In Azores, Portugal and anchored together by the upcoming one year anniversary of the death of Lela’s husband and June’s father, they find themselves running in circles attempting to come to terms with their grief — which only seems to be more and more at odds with each other. June’s grief has exploded and fractured across her life, turning her into a mess that has found a wish to experience her youth and life as much as she can from her father’s untimely death. Lela, on the other hand, has found her grief anchored to a single point — a fixation on the Women, Life, Freedom Movement of her home country, Iran.

At odds in a mother and daughter is the past and the present, tradition and revolution, the space between the east and west coast, life spent and life left, the things left unsaid, and the similarities between them. Just as the handsome tour guide João tells us, life comes in waves. And it seems as though the understanding between mother and daughter can only come in waves as well.

The wave rises. The water drowns us. Lela criticizes June for the way that she dresses, telling her to cover up. My mother looks at my face and frowns when she sees the silver piercings underneath my lips. June begs her mother to stop bringing up Iran and its politics out of embarrassment of her mother. Lela chastises June for eating messily. June snipes at Lela for saying that she is old. Lela and June go back and forth about June’s lack of ability to speak Farsi. My mother snipes at me for not knowing Vietnamese, and I insist that I do. One comment brushes against the other in just the wrong way and nobody knows how to turn it right without twisting their arms into a shape it can not go.

Then the water draws low, and the sky can finally see the sand beneath.

June and Lela strip down to their underwear together and stand at the tide of the beach together. Their bodies bare and beautiful and, from behind, just like each other. And, for a moment, despite the differences between them, they are able to bring themselves down to just their flesh. I am reminded of standing in my underwear with my mother as we put on our kimonos earlier that day. And I know the feeling of being a little embarrassed at being so exposed in front of someone who has both seen a part of your body and been kept at arm’s length at all times. Moreso, I know the comfort of knowing that the person next to you feels the same way.

Perhaps my favorite part of Honeyjoon is the fact that, although June and Lela run headfirst into the waves with each other, the cycle does not end. The waves continue to sink our heads and to reveal us, over and over again. And, even though June and Lela never let themselves drown, there are still things left unsaid between them. June never tells Lela that she hooked up with João or that she has the locks of her father’s hair that were thought to be lost. She never even tells her mother that the reason behind her dropping her residency is because of the sight of her father in the hospital. Lela never tells June how the freedom of her hair as she finds herself and her sexuality again after the loss of her husband is directly related to her grief towards her home country. And, though it is never made clear, the implication that a part of her relationship with her husband was confining for her.

But it doesn’t need to be said, does it? To reconcile the past and the present is not to spend time dwelling on either one of them. Just as how I would never tell my mother when I am getting a tattoo and how my mother would only redirect me to my grandfather when I ask about their time in Kobe, for immigrants, the very reasons for the sacrifices immigrant parents make by leaving their country are the reasons why there is a such a friction. June can not live her life as she wants to if her mother were intertwined in it, and Lela could never let herself hold her daughter back from having the life she wanted for June by giving up her home. The closest they can come to understanding each other is by dancing in the moonlight together, in two different forms of the defiance June has learned from her mother.

What Mehrel, Mayeri, Casar, and Honeyjoon has laid out bare for me is that I can only hope, when I have lived enough of the life I have been gifted, that I am still a stranger to my mother — and that I share her body once again.