I could be a ghost
I am barely here
I am invisible to most

Those who can see me
can see the dead
can sense the others in a room
who take up no space

I can move through walls
I can hang from the doorway
and levitate before your eyes

I can drift in and out
like a wave
begging and retreating

I can sit beside your body
without being there

I can float in the light

I am the dust particles
disappearing and reappearing
depending on the angle of your gaze
depending on the light

I can be off
just like that
like a switch
turning on and off at your will

I could be a ghost
I was never really here

`A film by Constant van Hoeven

The woman sleeping in a parking lot.
The man eating alone in a diner
The delivery driver who leaves food on your porch before dissapearing back into the night

People are alive, yet somehow no longer seen.

I could be a ghost was born from that idea- —and from a poem written by Catherine Meringolo that gave language to the feeling at the center of the film: being present in the world while somehow feeling invisible within it.

Not as a supernatural story, but a deeply human one.

It is the story of Norah, a woman who has disappeared from her own life.

When we meet Norah her husband is already gone. His death happened before our story begins. What remains is a woman who has slowly disappeared from her own life.

She has left behind her home, her identity, and the daughter she loves most. Now she drifts through the Hudson Valley almost unseen—delivering food, sleeping in her van, and quietly slipping into strangers' homes, borrowing fragments of lives she can no longer imagine having herself.

She is trying to disappear.

I don't think ghosts are always dead.
Sometimes they're the people we pass every day.

I Could Be a Ghost is a film about learning to see.

The camera will not chase Norah.

It will wait for her.

She will often exist at the edge of the frame, reflected in glass, obscured by architecture, or swallowed by the spaces around her.

The Hudson Valley will not be photographed as a postcard. We are interested in the places between destinations—the parking lots, diners, laundromats, storage units, motels, empty houses and forgotten roads.

Places where people pass through without leaving much evidence that they were ever there.

The film will be photographed in black and white and framed in 4:3. The image should feel intimate but restrictive, as though Norah is living inside a photograph she cannot escape.

Silence, natural sound and observation will carry as much weight as dialogue.

We don't want to tell the audience where to look.

Why I’m making this

When I first imagined I Could Be a Ghost, I thought I was making a film about grief.

The longer I lived with Norah, the more I realized I wasn't.
I am making a film about attention.

About the people we move past every day without really seeing; the delivery driver, the cashier, the woman sitting alone in a diner, the man sleeping in his car
People who enter our lives for a few seconds and disappear again.

It made me think about how easy it is to become invisible while still being completely present.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking:

Who is Norah?

And started asking:

Who have I failed to notice?

That question changed the film for me.

I don't want to make a film that tells an audience what to feel. I want to make one that asks them to look a little longer, to notice the person at the edge of the frame. To wonder about the life happening just outside their own.

Sometimes being seen is enough to remind us that we are still here.

Constant van Hoeven