In an experimental documentary, Kristy Choi sets out to understand who her mother was before she was a mother.

Who were our mothers before they became our mothers? This is the animating question behind Kristy Choi’s experimental documentary film “Herselves,” which explores both who Choi’s mother was and who she could have been. As Choi grew more interested in filmmaking and storytelling, she began to realize how little she knew about her mother’s life as a young woman. The facts she had were sparse. She knew that her mother had lost her father before immigrating to Los Angeles, that after arriving she had lived with her older sister, and that at some point she met Choi’s father and moved out East. But she had never probed the why and how of her mother’s journey. Before she had got married, before she had given birth, before she carried the dual, weighted identities of wife and mother, who had she been?

“I was ashamed I didn’t know the color, the tenor, of my mother’s life for the years she was her before she was my mom,” Choi told me. “I want to invite all viewers to ask themselves why there are those gaps in history and memory and knowledge. Why are you afraid to ask those vulnerable questions?”

For Choi, whose mother immigrated to America in the mid-eighties, that fear came from a guilt she believes is particular to second-generation children. “I was afraid that finding out about the challenges my mom had to go through would make me feel deeper guilt and shame for the privileges I was born with,” Choi said. In some of her previous work, she focussed, instead, on intergenerational communities outside her own, examining how people of color were fighting for environmental justice. But, as she told the stories of other people and other communities, Choi realized that finding answers—even ones she feared—was the only way to know what it meant to be her mother’s daughter.

Choi uses the film to try to illustrate her mother through bright strokes, as an individual in her own right. But Choi’s framework of daughterhood is hard to escape. At one point in the film, an avatar of her mother, Insun, looks directly at the camera and gently reprimands, “You framed my value in terms of my motherhood.” “Herselves” is a rumination on past and possibility, a daughter’s attempt to both uncouple herself from her mother and imagine her anew: in this vision of the past, we get vibrant, dreamy-hued glimpses of a young Insun belting karaoke atop plush vinyl seats and riding a Disneyland carousel. Her face is a site of contented wonder. Crucially, she is alone.

These scenes, Choi tells us in a voice-over, never actually happened: her mother’s reality in America did not include the kind of independence that Choi herself prizes. “Thinking about the concept of a room of one’s own, having control of my space and time and environment is so key in my ability to make things,” Choi said. “The idea that my mom never had that—and maybe never considered that—really struck me. My mom has such an eye for art, and I always think about what could she have made, what her sensitivity as an artist could have been, if she had been able to be on her own.”

Probing her mother’s life forced Choi to reconsider ideas she had previously held about what it meant to be an artist and a mother. Instead of seeing motherhood as limiting, she began to think about it as a path of creative power. “I think a lot about how, for first-generation people, motherhood can be their art, their craft, their way to create joy and beautiful experiences,” Choi said. Her daughterhood is the site of growth carefully tended, and she is now training a lens on the gardener. The question that moves the film is a quixotic preoccupation: we can never truly understand who our parents were before us. But that should not stop us, Choi believes, from seeking to understand them.

The imagined scenes were born out of conversations Choi had with her mother, and Choi describes the film as a “living document,” part of an ongoing dialogue between the two. “Sometimes I go and sing karaoke all by myself,” Choi tells her mother in a scene where the avatar of young Insun dances and sings. “Do you think that’s weird?”

Laughing wistfully, Insun instead tells her daughter, “I couldn’t be brave like you.” Choi quickly reminds her mother that she was the one who moved to a new country on her own.

Choi said it was important to her that the film was a collaboration between the two of them, and that she wanted to subvert the roles of interviewer and subject. In one scene, Insun holds the camera up to her own reflection, carefully conceiving her own frame. The moment is a daughter’s reminder that, ultimately, her mother is the master of her own image.