Director's Works
oskar med k, Make Me Feel Luke Jaden
Born in the shadows of a quiet Michigan town, Luke Jaden is a writer and director drawn to the electric pulse of human complexity. His work - raw, poetic, and visceral - straddles the line between cinematic meditation and emotional immediacy. From festival runs to global acclaim, Jaden’s stories live where intimacy meets intensity, always reaching for the marrow of what makes us human. His visual language is rich and atmospheric, crafting worlds that breathe honesty and ache with meaning.
MAKE ME FEEL was born from a place I was afraid to return to.
Saying goodbye to my mother was the most devastating moment of my life. When I sat beside her on her deathbed, she no longer knew who I was. She didn’t remember that she had a son. Watching the person who gave me life slip away while still breathing felt surreal, violent, and unbearable. I carried a deep hesitation in revisiting this memory - not only because it reopened grief, but because it forced me to confront a moment I never truly processed.
Through MAKE ME FEEL, I wanted to explore that final moment - not as I experienced it, but as I hoped she did. I imagined what her last vision might have been: movement instead of suffering, release instead of fear. Dance became a language for what words could no longer hold - a cathartic expression of letting go. Sitting beside her felt like our final dance together, a silent exchange between a mother and her son when language had failed us both.
The bond between a mother and son is our first home - it's the place we come from. And once the umbilical cord is cut, every moment after is a gradual farewell. The day she passed, just after her 44th birthday, I questioned why she had to go, why it had to end this way. I carry the regret that I never got to give her the birthday she deserved - the biggest one she’d ever had. After her death, I found messages on her phone where she expressed her deepest fear - that if it was her time, I would be left alone. This film became my response to that fear. A way of telling her that I’m okay. That I will be okay.
I wanted to explore the contrast between sickness and health - how illness can erase familiarity, how the home you come from can become unrecognizable as it fills with memories of pain. But I also wanted to reclaim something gentler: the idea that we don’t have to remember our loved ones only as they were at the end. We can choose to remember them in motion, in strength, in love.
This film is my way of letting her go and of believing that she could let go too. Believing that in her final moments, she felt peace instead of torment. That she knew her son would survive. That our last dance was enough.
~ LJ
