Casting Talents for "Eat Around It"

When hungry 11-year-old Veera is served dinner on a grimy, unwashed plate covered in crust, her protests are met with something even more eerily disturbing: her mother’s quiet, unyielding command, “Eat around it.” Confused by her family’s refusal to acknowledge the rot, Veera rejects the meal and the unsettling calm that surrounds it, retreating to her room. But her small rebellion unspools into a long night of buried truths, unraveling alongside Veera’s own understanding. Awakened by strange clattering from the kitchen, she finds her father, naked, confused, standing in a flood of dishwater, methodically scrubbing the same blackened pan. Oblivious to his state, he kindly offers her a Pop-Tart, still melting in its plastic wrapper. In the dim kitchen light, Veera peels off the black sludge and eats. Her protest swallowed, she joins the quiet choreography of her mother and sister, a family desperately shielding their father from the truth of his own Alzheimer’s.