The first images feel almost deceptive.
A grainy home video flickers across the screen. A mother embraces her child as they turn the pages of a family album, children dance before a tape recorder, tiny hands grip their parents’ hands as they glide across an ice rink, and laughter echoes from playground swings. These are the images of an ordinary childhood; until they aren’t. In Teresa Alfeld’s new documentary, ‘Hearse Chasing’, every archival frame becomes both evidence and elegy.
The Vancouver filmmaker, whose acclaimed ‘Doug and the Slugs’ and ‘Me‘ celebrated the joy of music and community, turns inward this time. Alfeld follows Calgary singer-songwriter Cassidy Waring as she, together with her brother Cooper, returns home, retracing the fractures of their childhood. “I first met Cassidy while she was writing her sophomore album, If I Had Only Been Better,” Alfeld tells REELway Magazine, “[a]nd as part of that, she was revisiting her childhood and the loss of her mother.” This, combined with Cassidy’s journey of healing through music, immediately felt like a documentary to Alfeld.
Confronting the past, processing trauma, seeking empowerment through music… the three-act structure was coming together quite organically, it seemed.
Director Teresa Alfeld then sensitively wove in themes of domestic violence, alcohol addiction, and child abuse, not with dramatic music or startling revelations but by letting the memory arrive first. Cassidy Waring, now an accomplished singer-songwriter, revisited the places, people, and stories that have defined and haunted her life. The documentary moves with the rhythm of remembering rather than reporting. “Trauma isn’t linear,” Alfeld tells REELway Magazine. The film attempts to have memory guide the structure and have emotions and facts coexist.
For Waring, choosing to revisit those memories publicly wasn’t a spontaneous act of courage. It was the result of years spent finding the language to tell her story. “It really felt like a combination of me being ready and all the right pieces coming together,” she says. “I’d been telling this story through music for years. Every time I shared it, people would come up afterward and tell me about their own difficult childhoods, grief, or living with CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Those conversations created community.”
When Alfeld suggested expanding that journey into a documentary, Waring says the answer came almost immediately. “We’d already built trust,” she explains. “I felt I was approaching the story from curiosity and compassion instead of fear. It was difficult, but I also believed it could have a meaningful impact.”
That trust is visible throughout the film. There is no sense of extraction. The camera waits. It listens.
As Waring reconnects with relatives and family friends, each conversation reshapes her understanding of what happened. Not because new facts emerge, but because familiar memories acquire new perspectives. “There wasn’t one particular moment or big shift,” that changed everything, she tells REELway Magazine. “Hearing other people’s recollections match my own helped me stop second-guessing my memory, especially after years of distance.”
Alfeld approached those conversations with unusual care.
From the earliest stages of production, she and producer Melissa James hired mental health coordinator Tolmie Greaves to support not only Cassidy and Cooper but the entire crew. Safety plans, emotional check-ins, and ongoing conversations about consent became part of the filmmaking process itself.
“From day one, the goal of this documentary was to build care into every step of the process, for both cast and crew,” Alfeld says. Those conversations around boundaries weren’t one-time discussions; they continued throughout the production. It’s a choice that changes the emotional texture of the film. Rather than documenting trauma, ‘Hearse Chasing’ documents what it looks like to move through trauma.
Music becomes another form of conversation.
Waring writes a song, lyrics emerge, melody falters, silence fills the room before another chord follows. “Songwriting has always been a safe language for me to process feelings,” she says. “I don’t usually go in with a plan or a story. I start with a memory or an image, and then I ask questions as I write, discovering answers along the way.” Sharing this insight, Waring says songwriting allows her to move beyond her analytical brain, into a space which is “often where I understand myself best.”
Alfeld intentionally preserves that unfinished process.
She wanted audiences to experience the song exactly as it existed in that moment. Alfeld explains the process of creating the song ‘Hearse Chasing’ mirrors the “the stop-start-edit nature of navigating grief and healing.” By the film’s end, it becomes impossible to separate the music from the documentary. Waring adds “The film allowed me to show an even more intimate side of these songs.” and “it gave me the opportunity to go deeper and share a more complex version of the story.” After screenings, she performed those songs live. “It is such a unique experience” to sing in front of audiences who already know “the people, the history, and the context. It felt incredibly personal.”
Music as a way of processing, confronting, and healing from trauma is perhaps what lingers most is the film, yet it refuses the comforting illusion of closure. Alfeld shares with REELway Magazine, “I view grief as an ongoing process; there is no destination or completion.” Waring nods towards that same truth from another angle. “I hope people feel less alone,” she says quietly. “Healing doesn’t always come from finding answers. Sometimes it comes from staying open to understanding.”
As the screen fades to black, ‘Hearse Chasing’ leaves behind something rarer than catharsis. It reminds us that healing is rarely cinematic. It doesn’t arrive in sweeping revelations or perfectly tied endings. More often, it happens in unfinished songs, difficult conversations, old videotapes, and the courage to look back; not to rewrite the past, but to finally see it with compassion.
And perhaps, like the songs Cassidy Waring writes throughout the film, healing is something we continue composing for the rest of our lives.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Sigil Films.
