‍ WRITER’S NOTE

What if the people who came before you hid a warning inside you, and you were the only one left who could still read it?

Hineni is Hebrew for "Here I am" — the answer Abraham gives when he is called, the word of someone who refuses to hide, who steps forward and is counted. It is the oldest way of saying: I will not be erased.

I come from two Jewish inheritances braided together, my father's Ashkenazi line, my mother's Sephardic one, carried, like one of the characters in this film, "like coins in opposite pockets." I grew up inside the particular music of Jewish Miami, Cuban and unapologetic, salt on the windowsill, a fig at the bottom of the glass. This film is the closest I have come to writing directly from that inheritance, from the sense that a family's memory is a thing passed down deliberately, encoded, entrusted to whoever is still listening.

HINENI follows Rebecca, a woman in Miami Beach who begins to understand that her father did not simply raise her, he hid something in her: a warning, a melody counted in intervals, a line that stretches back through every exile to a woman named Dinah, banished from Babylon for refusing to let her people be erased. Across centuries, the same sentence survives: One will forget, and the line will break, but memory is rebellion, and ink is survival. We are the carriers.

I wrote it because I believe that's true, that remembering is an act of defiance, that the people who love us plant themselves in us on purpose, and that we are all, whether we know it or not, carrying something forward for someone who is counting on us not to forget. The salt tries to erase. The fig seals and keeps. This is a story about choosing the fig.

— Leonard Tachmes, M.D.