DIRECTOR BIOGRAPHY - Kiki Ho

Kiki Ho is a Dutch documentary filmmaker whose work explores intimate and deeply personal stories, often focusing on themes of loss, grief, family, identity, memory, and mental health. Her filmmaking is rooted in a personal and observational approach, combining intimate storytelling with a strong interest in the relationship between personal experience, art, and wider social issues. Her feature-length documentary debut, With Sand in Our Eyes (2025), is a deeply personal exploration of grief and the aftermath of loss. Following the death of her sister Siu, a young artist, Ho turns to the traces she left behind — paintings, diaries, photographs, and other personal materials — as a way of reconstructing her memory and trying to understand the person she was. The film takes the audience into an intimate process of mourning, remembrance, and searching for meaning after an unexpected loss. In With Sand in Our Eyes, Ho moves between personal memories, archival materials, artistic expression, and the present-day process of dealing with grief. Her approach allows the film to exist simultaneously as a personal portrait, an exploration of family relationships, and a reflection on mental health and the ways in which society responds to people in vulnerable situations. Ho is closely involved in the creative process of her films, working across directing, writing, and editing. This authorial involvement gives her work a distinctive and intimate character, in which the filmmaking process itself becomes part of the story. With Sand in Our Eyes premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2025, where it received the KNF Critics Award for Best Premiere Film. With this debut, Kiki Ho establishes herself as a distinctive emerging voice in Dutch documentary cinema, using filmmaking as a means of preserving memory, confronting grief, and opening a space for reflection on subjects that are both deeply personal and universally human.