On a languid summer’s day in Toronto, a young woman cycles between increasingly intimate encounters with three discrete relations, trapped in a pattern of insatiable longing.

Director’s Statement

At a cultural moment when connection is ubiquitous, sexuality is fluid, urban centres grow denser, and relationships are seemingly unbounded by convention, my observation has been that loneliness is an increasingly alien sensation. Not that it’s less common, but that it’s often dismissed as foreign or anomalous, or that it’s even stigmatized. After all—what reason is there to feel alone, when you can communicate with anyone at the push of a touch screen? Why do we still experience unrequited cravings for intimacy in an increasingly sex positive culture? Why do we experience solitude, when we’re constantly surrounded by other people?

I wanted to make a film that addresses these apparent paradoxes, that grasps at the profound strangeness of yearning for something that exists everywhere all around you.

In a series of brief vignettes, the film juxtaposes Loretta against three different personalities, all of whom offer her something unique, and all of whom she desires something different from. Through the way Loretta pursues her emotional goals, and through her reaction to what they offer, we get an impression of a character in desperate pursuit of an ever-allusive social “something”. She can’t put her finger on what it is, and she can’t tell anyone what’s wrong, but she knows that something is missing. The increasingly familiar nature of her interactions serves to highlight the severity of this condition, culminating in the ultimate moment of isolation that many of us can relate to—feeling distant from someone we’ve just been intimate with.

I hope that this movie will resonate with, and galvanize, a diverse community of young adults who feel estranged by their own disaffection, and don’t quite know how to put words to the experience. I think there’s an opportunity with Loretta’s Flowers to lend clarity to an emotional experience that can be confusing, hard to diagnose, and even more difficult to talk about.