An old man walks into a quiet barbershop and begins sharing the story of his life. As memory and identity slip, a simple haircut becomes a quiet meditation on aging, legacy, and the need to be heard before we’re forgotten.
The Old Man and the Barber is the most personal piece I’ve ever created — not just as a filmmaker, but as a human being. It’s drawn from real events in my life and my co-writer’s, rooted in the quiet heartbreak of watching a parent slip into dementia. This story had been sitting in my chest for a long time. I didn’t write it to prove anything. I wrote it because I needed to.
The film is also a return to what I believe is pure cinema: two actors, one space, truthfully speaking and listening. No spectacle. No manipulation. Just presence, performance, and the camera bearing witness.
For nearly two decades, I’ve helped shape other people’s stories through music — chasing subtext, silence, and emotional precision. With this film, I wanted to do the same using image and performance. I approached it like a chamber piece: minimalist, restrained, and built entirely on rhythm, memory, and emotional breath. No flashbacks. No score. Just two people in a barbershop — one telling stories he barely remembers, the other listening, hoping to be seen.
We rehearsed extensively to treat the shoot like live theater. I worked with collaborators I trust — people I’ve built years of creative history with. We shot the film in a single day, allowing performance and stillness to drive the form. Its structure draws from stage plays and long-take cinema — formats that give time and space the chance to speak.
This is also a film about my generation — the children of immigrants who sacrificed everything to give us a future. Now it’s our turn, and many of us find ourselves unsure how to carry what they built. This story sits in that tension — between inheritance and uncertainty, between memory and identity.
The Old Man and the Barber is about fathers and sons. About the stories we inherit. About what we say when we don’t know who’s listening — and how love can survive even as memory fades.
This isn’t just my directorial debut. It’s a creative shift. After years of composing for other people’s visions, this is the first time I’ve told one of my own. And I chose to tell it the only way I know how: with honesty, restraint, and faith in the power of simplicity.
(posting soon)