Director's Note
This film began where many stories do—not with answers, but with something unresolved.
Taking the Lede
By Molly Loughman
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I made The Home Front to tell a story that has lived quietly inside me for years—shaped by what I’ve witnessed, felt, and tried to make sense of in the aftermath of loss. While I have never experienced opioid addiction myself, I’ve seen its destruction ripple through the lives of people I love and the small New England town I grew up in. As a journalist, I covered stories of the epidemic’s reach. As a person, I saw the silence it left behind—the unspoken grief, the fractured families, the shame that made mourning even harder.
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What struck me most was the void—the way people left behind are often forced to grieve in isolation, unsure whether they’re allowed to speak openly, or how to carry the truth when it feels too heavy or too stigmatized to name. You don’t ask to be pulled into addiction’s orbit. Sometimes you don’t even realize you’re in it until it’s too late. And when someone dies from addiction, they don’t just leave—they leave a kind of contagious darkness that their loved ones are left to absorb, to reckon with, and, hopefully, to climb out of.
The Home Front was born out of that void.
It was my MFA thesis at Emerson College, but more than that, it’s an offering—to the people who have lost someone, who are navigating quiet grief, and who are trying to live in the aftermath of something they never chose. It’s for all of us, really. Because this story, like so many others, is human. And we heal best when we’re not alone in the dark.
This story was imagined, shaped, and filmed on the ancestral homelands of the Nipmuc people in Massachusetts—land that holds centuries of memory, displacement, and quiet resilience. I acknowledge with gratitude the Indigenous people who have long stewarded this land, including members of a 17th-century “Praying Indian” community—Native people who were converted to Christianity and relocated into designated towns under colonial pressure and control.
It is not lost on me that a film about loss and silence was made on land marked by both. I hope this story honors that layered history with care and humility.
