I Wrote My First Feature Film About My Relationship to My Dad. Then, His Death Rewrote It

"Caity" filmmaker Lindsay Calleran writes for IndieWire about the unimaginable loss of her father, and how it forever shaped the film she was already planning on making about their bond.

Lindsay Calleran is an award-winning filmmaker from New York who holds an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. There, Lindsay’s work was nominated for the KODAK Student Award and the IFP Short Film Showcase. Prior to film, Lindsay taught and performed improv comedy at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre, and toured with the UCBTourCo. 

Lindsay’s short film “What I See When I Look” won the top prize after its premiere at the Sun Valley Film Festival and was included at Palm Springs ShortFest, Indie Memphis, Oak Cliff, and many more. Lindsay’s most recent short, “I’m Really Scared I’m Dying TBH” was commissioned in partnership with Modern Silent Shorts and first exhibited at Isabella Rossellini’s MAMA FARM. It won the audience award after premiering at Nitehawk Shorts Festival and went on to play festivals nationally before screening as part of the 2025 NYC Rooftop Summer Series. It was awarded the 2025 Trailblazer Award by Short of the Week. 

“Caity” is Lindsay’s debut feature. “Caity” is supported by Sundance Catalyst, the Gotham Film Market, the OUTFEST Screenwriting Lab, The SAGIndie New Voices! Reading Series, and the Los Cabos Gabriel Figueroa Meet Market.

My dad died very unexpectedly in the middle of development on “Caity,” a film I was making about my relationship with him. A heart attack, out of the clear blue sky, on a particularly hot day in May. “Caity” was not meant to be a grieving endeavor, but the continuation of a collaboration between he and I that had thus far lasted a lifetime.

Sitting in the small holding room where they put the families who are crying too loud for the ER, I gasped when I remembered, then said to my mom — “But we didn’t make the movie yet.”

Everything was a “we” when it came to my dad and I. In between working together at a dinner theater for 15 years, my dad helped me make short films. Endless roles and reshoots and costumes and car rides. I won’t attempt to explain what it’s like to have a deep creative relationship with a parent, except to say that I know it shaped everything about me.

He was meant to play a small character in “Caity” — “Tall Dave,” an old-timer of the haunted house where much of the film takes place, a crustacean of sorts. We spit-balled one evening, looking for a little extra something — “What if he was always eating peanuts?”.

In writing “Caity,” the haunted house became my take on our dinner theater. Fate led me to Kevin McCurdy’s Haunted Mansion, a local Halloween attraction in operation for 50 years this year, and one just ten minutes away from my parents’ home.

My dad came with me to scout, and he and the titular Kevin McCurdy got on like a house on fire. Cut from the same used and re-used, torn apart and tie-dyed cloth, these men shared something that, I swear to God, is the world’s most precious resource: a willingness to spend a thousand hours of creative labor on ten minutes of shared joy. It was not long before my dad was working for Kevin at the very haunt which was meant to be my metaphorical stand in.

Art imitated life, imitated art, as they say.

The shock of my dad’s passing hurdled into most of who knew him. It was difficult to make sense of. Kevin; his business partner and wife, Holly; and her daughter Kelly tapped me on the shoulder at his funeral service. It was three years into the development of “Caity” and about a year and a half before we would come to shoot the film on location at their haunt — where they’d all come to work behind and in front of the camera, Kevin taking on the role originally meant for my father. All of us, too sensitive in my favorite ways, skin pulled back from our bones, hugged in a group and wept without words.

There was an echo – “But we didn’t make the movie yet.”

As I write, it is two years to the day since my dad passed. I knew, and he knew, that “Caity,” if made, would be an exploration of the effects of alcoholism and addiction on the family system, with as much specificity as I could muster. It would also put on display much of what had went on in my own coming-of-age — an aching terror at vulnerability, a growing desire to escape through drugs and alcohol myself, (my father passed with 15 years sober, and I recently celebrated six).

Though fictionalized, we both knew “Caity” would expose parts of ourselves. What I didn’t know was that it would become an attempt to reach across time and tell him all the reasons why I loved him.

The script changed when my dad died. It became softer. The editor of “Caity” and a dear friend, Joe Stankus, has theorized that people may be more likely to respond positively to a cut of a film when they’re told it’s done — not because they’re just being nice, but because they interpret choices with more curious wonder when they know someone has deemed them finished. I’m not sure if this phenomenon is real or just something we tell ourselves to get through an edit’s hard times, but it was true with my father’s death.

When his life was deemed finished, I had no notes. I wanted to tell him, to tell everyone, that all these imperfections were part of it.

The older I get, the more I think I wanted to make movies just to talk to my dad about them. Every milestone comes with a twinge. I can’t talk to him in the ways I had expected. For years, I’d leave the restaurant I worked at on the Upper West Side and give him a late call. He’d answer, the brightness of a night owl: “Hey girl, what’s the news!” I’d walk down Amsterdam toward the subway and run through the updates, which, at the time, were often meandering and infuriating. He’d hang on every word and I felt a pride I can’t explain. Those memories are swollen, soaked through. Those walks — when the soreness in my exhausted feet throbbed and my dad and I gabbed excitedly about the goings on of a film that was still a pipe dream — were more precious than the film itself could ever be.

Now, two years since he disappeared, we made the movie — and when I think about production, I remember him there. I guess it’s because he was. Not just in the posthumous cameo I created for him because I knew he would think it was funny, but in the air, in the space between me and everything. In the miracles that made it all work. I know he loves how it happened, exactly how it was always supposed to. Chiara Aurelia and Morgan Spector with their unimaginable gifts, a team of collaborators he would’ve adored, Kevin’s haunt perfectly on display, friends and family sewn into the fabric at each turn.

I hate it, but I find that accepting it helps me catch a better glimpse of the gifts hiding in plain sight.

There are many — more I see every day. I got to process the loss of my father through doing what we loved more than anything on Earth — making shit up. And on the days I swore I’d leave set and flee the country because I was terrified, I’d imagine him beside me, and who’s to say he wasn’t? The thread of adoration and acceptance that stretches from me to my father is braided into “Caity.” It’s my greatest hope that some may see themselves in it.

“Caity” will premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.