Why I Make Films

Everywhere I look, things are changing. We live in a time of extraordinary momentum. Material wealth is at an all-time high in human history; many of us have enough food, clothing, and technology far beyond the basic necessities. Why then, with such abundance, do so many of us so feel so empty?

It’s a question that plagues people and communities from the richest nations to the poorest ones.

For over than a decade, I've traveled to places around the world to try to find answers to that question. Places where the collision between tradition and modernity is immediate and inescapable, where communities are forced to choose between preservation and adaptation. Did these cultures also wrestle with the very same things? How did they deal with it?

What I found surprised me.

These traditions weren't relics waiting to be made obsolete. They are living things. adapting, absorbing, transforming, because we are living things. I'm not interested in documenting disappearance or making elegies for dying cultures. It's too simple a narrative, and it's not the whole story. The world is unraveling along cultural and ideological lines. The old narratives no longer hold the power they once had, leaving us free-floating as we head toward an increasingly uncertain future.

The natural instinct is to retreat into familiar narratives, into stories that feel safe because we already know how they end…

There is nothing more dangerous.

I'm interested in transformation, in moments when people and communities decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind. I'm interested in how meaning outlasts the forms that once held it.

But finding new stories worth telling— stories that transform how we see the world and ourselves, requires diving headfirst into uncertainty. It's risky and full of pitfalls, but it is far riskier to risk nothing and therefore learn nothing. New stories will be created even as the old ones fade, and the stories we choose to elevate will shape how our world unfolds. I choose to be a part of the new telling. After all, we are not just the stories we tell ourselves. We are the stories we choose to tell next.