For years after my grandfather passed, I couldn't look at a photograph of him without feeling shame. Not grief, but shame. The kind that sits in your chest and tightens every time you remember you could have picked up the phone, could have called back, but didn't.

Pops was the most patient man I've ever known. He said it all the time, "patience is a virtue," and he lived it. He built many things, from companies to houses and cabins, one being his own in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. But his biggest purpose was building time with people. He'd spend whole days just talking, just asking questions, remembering details about your life that even you had forgotten.

When I was a kid, I used to sit with him every day after school. He'd ask what I was up to, what homework I had, and would make me eat something before I started. Throughout the afternoon, he would come sit next to me. He wouldn't talk or try to help, he'd just sit there. Being next to him was all I ever needed.

I've been trying to get back to that feeling ever since he died.

POPS is the film I wrote to find it again. It's about Will, a young man who returns to his late grandfather's cabin and comes face to face with something impossible: Cary, as real and present as the day he died. At first, Will fights it, the manifestation feels like an accusation, a reminder of every call he didn't answer. But Cary isn't there to haunt him, he's there to sit with him, to be present one more time.

This January, I'm taking a crew to my grandfather's actual cabin in Maine, the place where he taught me to fish, to drive a boat, to make a fire, to measure and cut wood. The place where he taught me how to love. For two years after he passed, I avoided it, it didn't feel right without him there. Going back now to tell this story in that space feels like the closest I'll ever get to sitting next to him again.

I'm making this film for him, but I'm also making it for anyone who knows what it's like to carry a phone call you didn't return, a visit you didn't make, or words you never got to say. You're not alone in that. My hope is that this film can do for someone else what creating it has done for me: help you look at those photographs again and feel gratitude instead of guilt, and remember the relationship for what it was, not just how it ended.

I want this to be the best thing I've ever made, he deserves that. Honestly, there's a knot in my throat every time I think about it, the fear that I won't get it right mixed with the determination to try anyway.

Patience is a virtue. He taught me that. I'm still learning it.

Thank you for helping me make this film.

— Christopher Jesski