KINGSTON, Jamaica — Appearing at the recent Caribbean Studies Association’s 50th annual conference on Caribbean Vibes and Vibrations (Culture, Identity and Development in Transformative Times), the multifaceted filmmaker Tshay Meade presented, frame by frame, an ideal reel of what’s appealingly required to produce animated films.

A New Yorker of Jamaican parents, Nigel and Marcia Williams, the event also marked the presentation of her latest project, Tell Me When You Get Home – an animated film that follows 15-year-old Honest Cardamom as she encounters the spirit of her late mother at a family party.

The film is a tender, visually rich meditation on love, family, memory, and the afterlife.

“I made the film to process the loss of someone dear to me, who passed suddenly and tragically when I was 20 years old. I write from a really personal place, and my movies usually reflect my lived experience. The film is only 10 minutes long, but it was in production for almost three years. Some themes that continually emerge are family, kinship, self-expression, and grief. I really try to make my work expressive of the full range of humanity. I’m exploring loss and sorrow, but there is delight and pleasure. I tried to make this film feel the way I felt in the wake of my family’s loss—heartbroken and tender but also connected and resilient.”

The budget for this production was raised by a small team of Philadelphia-based Black women producers, and the majority of the artists who brought this work to life are women of color based between New York City and Philadelphia.

The film recently had its world premiere at South by Southwest after wrapping production in February of this year.

“I won a national award, called Creative Capital, to support the project,” she says, “and producing this work has been the honor of a lifetime.”

She has been making short films for the past 10 years. “I was inspired to pick up a camera in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement around 2015. I was learning a lot, organising with my peers, and I had a lot of opinions about the way the world needed to change. I made a documentary that year called Walking Wounded, a short film about Black women’s experiences with street harassment. After that I directed a piece called Gales, a short narrative project about Indigo, a nurse in Baltimore who is balancing work, friendship, and romance. Since then I have made about five more shorts—some documentary, some narrative, some hybrid.”

Meade was exposed to filmmaking during her time working behind the scenes at BlackStar Film Festival, where she began volunteering as a college sophomore in 2015. “At BlackStar I was exposed to filmmakers working in all genres, forms, and approaches. It was an amazing environment for me as a young person. Then I pursued a master’s degree in filmmaking at the University College of London in the UK, where I learned how to shoot and edit. Filmmaking allows me to facilitate creative processes without needing to be in front of the camera, which is great. Eventually, though, I plan to bring myself on stage and start acting.”

Meade shares how she’s driven, grateful for her upbringing. “I’m so thankful to be raised by Jamaicans. We are some of the most generous, hilarious, hardworking, and tenacious people on earth. I feel a great sense of responsibility to reflect what I learned in my upbringing, which is a certain quality of care that extends beyond the self and even beyond the family. Even if there was not a lot of material wealth, I feel wealthy because I was loved so immensely by my community of origin. My family taught me how to care for others, how to look out for others, and how to give freely. I consider this my heritage, and this is what I try to highlight in my latest project—that really pure quality of love and togetherness.”

It is heritage that has lent and sharpened focus for her personal and professional development. It has kept her at home.