BELOVED GHOSTS

Logline:

After losing countless friends to Vancouver's toxic drug crisis, suicide and systemic violence, a young Roma artist sculpts life-sized memorial figures from discarded clothing and leaves them in the city's forgotten corners overnight. As his sanctuary — an artist collective housed in a condemned motel — faces demolition, he must find a new refuge for his grief, his art, and his hope of being seen.

Hi, I'm Kagan Goh, a Vancouver filmmaker and mental health advocate. I'm raising funds to complete Beloved Ghosts, a half-hour documentary about Lupo, a young Roma artist who sculpts life-sized memorial figures from clothing left behind by friends lost to Vancouver's toxic drug crisis. Under cover of night, he installs them in alleyways and rooftops, silent tributes in a city that keeps sweeping its grief away.

This story matters to me because I've spent over thirty years as a Mad Artist telling stories from lived experience, under the principle "Nothing about us without us." Lupo trusted me with his grief, his art, and his community at the Artists Lodge, a converted motel now facing demolition. That sanctuary, and the fragile community it holds, is disappearing. This film is our chance to preserve it before it's gone.

Your donation will fund production: cinematography, sound design, editing, and post-production, so we can finish this film with the care and craft Lupo's story deserves. Every dollar helps us capture a vanishing sanctuary and honour the people it was built to hold.

Thank you for helping us tell this story while there's still time.

The Creative Team:

Lupo

Lupo is a self-taught street artist living and working on the unceded, traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nations. He makes sculptures and paintings out of whatever materials are available. His subject matter ranges from joy and celebration to pain and isolation, but most of his recent work focuses on experiences of erasure (the systemic displacement, dehumanization and devaluing of people, families and communities in the name of profit). His ongoing work includes a community project called “Beloved Ghosts”, honouring and making visible the memories of loved ones we've lost to toxic supply, state violence, or suicide.

Primary Filmmaker — Director / Producer

Kagan Goh

Precious Star Films Inc.

Vancouver-based filmmaker, writer, and mental health advocate. Award-winning work includes The Day My Cat Saved My Life and Common Law (Stigma Breaker Award, Mental Filmness Festival 2025) and the memoirs Who Let in the Sky? and Surviving Samsara (2022 Singapore Literature Prize finalist). Active in Vancouver's spoken word and Mad Arts communities for 30+ years, working from the principle “Nothing about us without us.” Kagan met Lupo through a shared exhibition, leading to the friendship that grounds this film.

The Creative Team:

John-David (JD) Hutchison — Executive Producer.

John-David (JD) Hutchison is a Canadian filmmaker; a producer, writer & director, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Over a multi-decade career in the independent film industry, he has cultivated a reputation for his practical, ground-up approach to production, drawing from extensive on-set technical experience. In the past 4 years, John-David has become increasingly prolific; producing 15 short films and completing his 2nd feature film as writer/director. John-David is the Executive Artistic Director of The Recovered Arts Film & Theatre Collective, a non-profit supporting persons in addiction recovery through film & theatre.

Rich Tran — Director of Photography. Whether documenting people with vision loss and blindness in Nepal, struggling kids in North Chicago, the impoverished favelas of São Paulo, Brazil, or the war-torn city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Rich is ready to take calculated risks to get the shot. Rich strives to merge science and art, for a craft in a constant state of learning, while knowing full well that emotion and story supersede all of it. Rich appreciates the beauty in the brutal honesty of mathematics and the immeasurable subjectivity of the arts.

Candelario “Cande” Andrade — Editor. Born in Mexico and based in Vancouver, Cande is a video editor and media designer. He has edited for the Knowledge Network and cut short-form and documentary work for Bard on the Beach, Misko Way and Mortal Coil, along with animation projects for Mochizuki Studios. He edited both of Kagan Goh's recent mental health shorts, The Day My Cat Saved My Life and Common Law. He also designs projection and multimedia for Vancouver theatre companies, and is co-artistic director of Rough House Productions.

Malcolm Dow — Sound Design & Music. Malcolm Dow's background in music and sound design brings a unique auditory dimension to the project. Raised in a creative family and having pursued a career in music composition and sound design for theatre and film, Malcolm has a keen sense for auditory storytelling. His work, such as the award-winning score for "The Graduate" and his contributions to documentaries like "Each and Every One," demonstrates his ability to enhance narratives through sound. His expertise will be vital in creating an immersive and emotionally resonant sound landscape for "Beloved Ghosts." Most recently, Malcolm was Supervising Sound Editor, Re-Recording Mixer, and Music Composer, collaborating with filmmaker Kagan Goh on “The Day My Cat Saved My Life” and “Common Law.” www.malcolmdowsound.com

Filmmaking Techniques

Beloved Ghosts moves between two visual registers that mirror its emotional terrain. The Beloved Ghosts sequences are stylized, nocturnal, and contemplative: close-ups on hands shaping fabric, wide shots of Lupo's small figure against Vancouver's glassy skyline, drone footage that dwarfs him within the scale of the city.

These sequences carry camera interviews with Lupo in disguise, his identity hidden beneath a balaclava hoodie covering his face because of the illegal, activist nature of his work and his history of being criminalized — punctuated by the quiet ritual of creation and release, and held by Lupo's intimate voiceover.

The Artists Lodge sequences shift into vérité: handheld, sunlit, communal — mural-covered hallways, impromptu studio visits, candid conversations about rent, survival, and art. Here the camera becomes a participant rather than an observer, immersed in a community bracing for its own displacement.

Sound will carry as much weight as image. Ambient textures — traffic, construction, wind on the bridge — are woven against near-silence in the studio, composed to underscore the film's movement between isolation and belonging.

In pre-production, our director will work closely with the cinematographer to build a shared visual vocabulary through reference images, shot lists, and tone boards — keeping the poetic sequences lyrical without losing emotional truth, and the vérité sequences grounded in the trust and spontaneity that authentic access requires.

Mental Health Themes

What & How

Beloved Ghosts explores grief and memorialization inside a community living through continuous loss. Lupo has lost more friends than he can count — to a toxic drug supply, to suicide, to systemic violence — and the film treats that accumulation not as statistics but as a weight carried in the body. It examines mental illness not through diagnosis but through ritual — the way making becomes a container for pain that has nowhere else to go. Every sculpture is made in memory of a named person: “Every Beloved Ghost has a name. I just give it a shape.”

Grief without ceremony. When the people you lose are people the city has already written off, there is often no funeral, no obituary, no record. Lupo calls it erasure — “People aren't just dying; they're being erased” — and his sculptures are the ceremony that was never held.

Isolation and reaching out. Installed overnight in alleys, on fences, on bridges, each figure is addressed to whoever finds it: “I hope people see them and know they're not alone.”

Displacement as a mental health crisis. The Artists Lodge is scheduled for demolition. The film treats losing a place that holds you as an injury rather than an inconvenience and follows what precarity does to a man whose belonging has always been provisional — first as Roma in Europe and the UK, now as an artist in one of the world's least affordable cities.

Anticipatory grief. Multiple sclerosis is taking the work from him; a sculpture that once took ten hours now takes thirty. He is mourning his friends and his own capacity at once.

Lupo has intervened in moments of crisis while installing his work at night. The film will handle this, and every reference to suicide and overdose, in line with Canadian safe-messaging guidance — no method or location detail, and no loss shown without the community response that met it.

Collaboration with Organizations

Executive Producer John-David Hutchison brings a partnership with The Recovered Arts Film & Theatre Collective, a non-profit supporting people in addiction recovery through film and theatre, keeping the production accountable to lived-experience standards. He has also secured The Crisis Centre of BC, whose team will serve as peer support specialists — guiding authenticity and reviewing content for safe messaging across crisis support, suicide prevention and post-intervention — and CAPSA (Community Addictions Peer Support Association), which works to reduce stigma around substance use health. The production also works directly with the Artists Lodge community and Vancouver's Mad Arts networks.

Lived Experience & Connection

How Lived Experience Is Included

The production team members have lived experience of mental health and addiction (substance use disorder). Director Kagan Goh has lived experience of a mental health diagnosis, namely bipolar mood disorder, and Producer John-David Hutchison has lived experience of addiction, which informs the Team’s approach to the authenticity and fidelity to Lupo’s story. This film is built from the inside out. Lupo's story is his own, told in his own voice, about his own grief and his own Roma identity. Behind the camera, I bring over thirty years as a Mad Artist and mental health advocate in Vancouver's spoken word and disability arts communities, working from the principle “Nothing about us without us.” That principle shapes every stage of this production: Lupo remains a full collaborator in how his story and his art are represented, not simply a subject observed.

This year marks eight years since the Province of BC declared a public health emergency regarding the drug crisis. Unregulated drug toxicity is the leading cause of death in British Columbian children and youth, and an average of seven people die every day from overdose. Lupo’s sculptures address these urgent social issues, standing as stark reminders of the lives lost due to current drug policies—and inviting passersby to reflect on the human cost of systemic neglect and the need for more compassionate, effective measures.

Your Connection — Why You, Why This Film, Why Now

I have spent thirty years telling stories from inside the experience of mental illness, because I know what it costs when no one else will. Beloved Ghosts is not a story I am observing from the outside — it is one I have the honour of helping Lupo tell, friend to friend, artist to artist. I have watched him carry grief that would break most people and turn it into something the whole city can see, if only for a night. I have watched the Artists Lodge hold him the way almost nothing else in this city ever has. And I know, because I have lived it too, what it means to lose the place that keeps you alive.

This film must be made now. Lupo faces progressive health challenges from multiple sclerosis that will eventually prevent him from continuing to make his sculptures and artwork. The Lodge is coming down. The toxic drug crisis keeps taking people we love. Roma stories are rarely told, and mental health stories even less so, on their own terms. If we wait, the Lodge will be rubble, the sculptures will be memory, and we will have lost our chance to show the world what sanctuary looks like while it is still standing. I am asking for the resources to make sure that does not happen — to make sure Lupo's ghosts are seen before this city decides they were never here at all.