A Rupture House Production

Lunaria

☾ ○ ☽

What we inherit is not where we have to end.

A grief drama with magical realism
Enter the grove↓
The Logline

After her mother's sudden death, a withdrawn young photographer returns to the family cabin she inherited, only to uncover a hidden journal and a mysterious grove of glowing lanterns that force her to confront the depression her mother carried in silence, and the cycle she must choose not to continue. To inherit her mother's silence, or break it.

The Story

An ordinary grief,
told in lantern light.

Juniper "June" Wilde, 28, returns to her late mother Sandra's isolated cabin in the mountain town she fled years ago. Numb in the wake of the funeral, she struggles to name the grief she has inherited alongside the cycles of depression that have followed her since childhood. What she breaks is not the inheritance itself, but the silence around it.

At the cabin, June reconnects with Micah, a gentle, weathered childhood friend who never left the mountain town and has quietly cared for Sandra's home in her absence. Rather than forcing June to speak, he offers something rarer: presence. He leads her deep into the forest to a hidden grove where lanterns hang glowing among the trees, lights the locals believe carry the souls of the lost.

As June sorts through what her mother left behind, she comes face to face with a quiet inheritance that has shadowed the women of her family for generations. Lunaria follows her through grief, memory, and the fragile, unprovable comfort of the grove, toward the courage it takes to name what has long gone unspoken.

Lunaria moodboard: glowing lanterns hanging in a night forest
The Themes

Four threads, one knot.

The Inheritance of Silence

Sandra never spoke her depression aloud. June inherited that silence before she inherited anything else. The film treats silence as a thing handed down, and breakable.

Earned Honesty

The most radical act in the film is a four-word sentence at a door. The story protects that moment by withholding every easier version of it.

Light as Ambiguous Mercy

The lanterns are never confirmed. They appear when June is most undone, and vanish when she goes looking. The film offers comfort without certainty.

Women's Inner Weather

The hormonal weather passed from mother to daughter, treated as topography, not pathology. The film makes women's interiority visible as landscape.

Director's Statement

I grew up in a family of women who endured.

Lunaria is about what women inherit through the body: chemistry, silence, shame, and the language we are rarely given for what is happening inside us. The glowing lights in the mountains become the first thing in years that ask June to look outward, to trust her own perception again, and to consider that what she inherited does not have to be the whole of what she becomes.

I want the camera to stay with her face when she has no language, to let the forest speak where she cannot, and to allow the supernatural to enter the way intuition does: quietly, bodily, before the mind can explain it away. The film embraces restraint: long takes, available light, silence over score, and a palette that slowly earns its colour as June earns clarity.

Lunaria is a quiet Canadian feature about inherited depression, but it is also part of a conversation several generations of women were never invited into. I want to make that silence visible.

Syd Whalen
The Creatives

The people behind the film.

Lunaria is being brought to life by a Vancouver-based team drawn to intimate, image-driven storytelling.

Syd Whalen
Writer & Director

Syd Whalen

Syd Whalen is a Vancouver-based writer-director whose work spans narrative, documentary, and music film. Her films have earned international recognition, including two Cannes World Film Festival wins: Best Female Director for the documentary The Reflection (2024) and Best Psychological Film for the narrative short The End. (2025). Through her company, Rupture House Productions, she writes and directs original, festival-driven films exploring women's interior lives, grief, and mythic realism.

Aaron Closs
Director of Photography

Aaron Closs

Aaron Closs is a North Vancouver-based filmmaker and photographer specializing in adventure, wildlife, and documentary storytelling that places human experience at the centre of natural landscapes. With a documentary background from Capilano University, he has worked across the adventure, tourism, and environmental sectors, collaborating with organizations from Northwest Territories Tourism to the Lake Winnipeg Foundation. He brings a cinematic, story-driven eye rooted in authenticity, place, and human connection.

Yasmin Vejs Simsek
Producer

Yasmin Vejs Simsek

Yasmin Vejs Simsek is a feminist consultant, educator, creative producer, and writer based in Vancouver, BC. With a BA in Theatre and Creative Writing and an MA in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, she works at the intersection of the creative industries and intersectional social activism for self-identified women. She works from an anti-colonial mindset, striving to create inclusive, accessible spaces across every project.

Alejandra Ruiz
Producer

Alejandra Ruiz

Alejandra is a Mexico City-born actor and producer based in Vancouver, BC. Professionally trained in New York City, she works across voice acting, film, television, and independent producing. Her credits include the short films Ingénue (2026), in which she also starred, and Human Nature (2026), winner of the Audience Choice Award at the Run N Gun Film Festival. With Lunaria, she continues developing intimate, story-driven projects that center women's experiences.

Why It Matters

An intimate film about naming
what generations could not.

Lunaria refuses to reduce mental illness to diagnosis. It treats inherited depression as weather: atmospheric, recurring, passed through generations until someone chooses to step into it differently. For audiences drawn to intimate, emotionally truthful cinema, it offers recognition where there has too often been silence.

The Cultural Moment

A story about mental-health inheritance and the radical act of naming inherited pain, arriving as more people seek language for what earlier generations carried alone.

Who It's For

For women aged 25 to 45 and audiences drawn to the emotional restraint of Aftersun, The Quiet Girl, and A Ghost Story, and the quiet wonder of Bridge to Terabithia.

The Motif

Lunaria, the moon-pod plant, common name Honesty. Its pale pods open into seedlight. A luna moth bookends the film: the truth told in pictures.

The Trailer

First look.

The feature film is in development. A trailer will live here for the festival and press push.

☾
Trailer Coming Soon
Updates & News

From the grove.

Milestones from development to festival run.

July 2026
Development

Lunaria enters development

Rupture House Productions opens development on Lunaria, a feature-length film. Director's prep package and pitch materials complete.

Coming soon
Team

Key creative team assembling

Director of Photography Aaron Closs joins producers Yasmin Vejs Simsek and Alejandra Ruiz, with 1st AD Hassan Razavi, gaffer Oscar Usher, and key grip Tom Kacher rounding out the core crew.

Q1 2027
Production

Toward principal photography

A fourteen-day shoot planned in the British Columbia interior. Festival premiere targeted for TIFF, Sundance, and VIFF.

Follow the Film

Walk with us into the lantern light.

Be the first to hear about the trailer, festival premieres, and the journey from script to screen.