WRITER-PRODUCER NOTE

 I wrote this film in response to entering a stage of life defined by quiet goodbyes to people I love: helping my children step out into the world while gently helping my elderly parents retreat from it.

As an immigrant from a family shaped by generational movement, I know how often people end up far from where they began. Now, as the father of two children myself, there’s a sense that history may repeat— that they too may emigrate on their own, as I did, as their grandparents did before me, and their ancestors before them. What kind of new world will they inherit when they arrive? Will they find familiar community there, echoes of home?

It’s in this midlife space between beginnings and endings that a particular bittersweetness lies— the awareness that love often means guiding people both toward life and away from it even if it means letting go. A bittersweetness that looks backward with warmth and gratitude toward the people who first carried you into the world, and forward into the unknown future with concern and hope.

 I Am Not The Last glimpses a fear of this unknown future by asking humankind’s age-old question, Are we alone?

This grand question intimately erupts at a liminal moment of crisis for a mother and son isolated by an alien place as diaspora, scattered people displaced by catastrophe. It’s a cinematic expression of that unbearable weight of love and responsibility we feel at the brink of letting go and at the uncertainty of life beyond our understanding.

Through this imaginative story of familial bond, the film offers a singular experience about how vital human connection is, especially when we are adrift in a foreign place.

— Mark Tenn