Seána
Director: Audrey Lane
United States, 2024, 11 min
Shooting Format:Digital and 8mm
Festival Year:2025
Category:Documentary Short
Genres:Mental Health, Grief, Hybrid, Youth
Cast:Rosalie Neal
Crew:Audrey Lane, Seika Paradeis, Camila Grimaldi, Nicole Lynn Cohen, Cece Chan, Angie Nicholas, Zack Chalmers, Joseph Neilon Magee, Rajiv Awasthi, Jacqueline Brockel
Email:audreytaylorlane@gmail.com
Synopsis
In the days leading up to her late best friend’s birthday and death anniversary, a young woman teeters between celebration and sorrow, reflecting on how early loss shaped her very understanding of the world. Through a powerful hybrid of fiction and documentary, this project contrasts romanticized portrayals of grief with the raw, evolving reality of mourning.
Trailer
About the director
Audrey Lane is a documentary and fiction filmmaker from a small town in New Jersey. With a background in psychology and experience working with end-of-life and special needs individuals, Audrey embraces storytelling with care and humility. Her projects often focus on activism and delve into themes such as mental health, community, and resilience. After graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2020, Audrey’s short film, "Before We Die," won Best Short Film at the Boston Film Festival and her screenplay, "Balloons Over Neptune," was selected as a finalist for the Sundance Feature Film Development Lab. In 2023, Stowe Story Labs awarded Audrey and her co-writer a scholarship to develop their women-centered episodic series, "Kitchen Tables," which is now in development with Harlem Film Company. Audrey is the recipient of the 2025 Voices With Impact grant and is currently co-directing a feature-length documentary about refugees and immigrants in New Jersey.
Filmmaker's note
"SEÁNA" is a deeply personal exploration of grief and youth mental health, framed around intimate conversations with my friend, Rosalie, who tragically lost her best friend, Seána, at age seventeen. This sensitive film delves into how a profound and unthinkable loss at such a formative age shapes one's identity, worldview, and relationships.
The process of making "SEÁNA" was humbling, inspiring, and filled with moments of deep attunement, reckoning, and learning. As an end-of-life doula, creating this film alongside my friend Rosalie reminded me of the sacred, singular nature of grief—and that no matter how intimately we know someone, there is always more to uncover. Rosalie taught me that even after wounds become scars, they can still bleed—and that the scars we carry from adolescence often run the deepest.
We let friendship and candor guide our process and shake up traditional narratives as we expanded from a two-person team to a small diverse crew composed almost entirely of women, and explored multiple mediums: 8mm film, digital, and archival footage.
As a filmmaker working at the intersection of documentary, fiction, end-of-life care, and psychology, I’m deeply committed to exploring themes of grief, adolescent mental health, and collective healing. These stories are not only personal to me, they're necessary. Following our festival run, we hope to bring "SEÁNA" to schools and community spaces across the country through impact screenings, in partnership with organizations like INELDA and the COPE Foundation, to help foster more open, compassionate conversations around loss and youth mental health.