“A major source of inspiration for the film was Maya’s questions about the world, starting with questions to do with her perceptions of the physical world, and as she got older, questions more to do with social behaviour. These ‘innocent’ questions (apart from being almost impossible to answer) seemed to me to be of a philosophical order that challenged long-established ‘truths’ about the world. They made it clear to me that ‘knowledge’ which is hidden and acquired, supplants raw perception in many areas of our understanding (we learn to ‘see’ the table as square, not trapezoid).” — Guy Sherwin
Sherwin made this film over a 3 year period during his daughter’s discovery of language, when she was first learning to talk and write, and was partly inspired by the book The Child’s Conception of the World (1929) by child psychologist Jean Piaget.
