Graveyard

I'm an avid fan of crime thrillers and a sucker for stories about unlikely heroes in unlikely places. In my first ever film, I sought to combine these sensibilities in a highly personal neo-noir tale that navigates themes of guilt, morality, and absolution.

Graveyard follows a solitary parolee who works as a janitor assigned the graveyard shift—quite literally. Behind on rent and threatened with a parole violation by his headstrong landlord Jim, The Janitor makes a desperate arrangement with some old "colleagues" from his criminal past to make ends meet: using his custodial position as a guise to perform murder clean-ups and burying the victims' bodies. With each disposal and burial, he sinks deeper into moral obscurity, even selling the victims’ belongings to a flambuoyant pawnbroker for extra cash. Increasingly trapping himself in a life he once vowed to leave behind, the janitor must confront his own involvement in the violence, setting him on a path towards redemption—or destruction.

At the film's core is a man at a crossroads. While desperate to move forward with his life, he struggles to escape his past sins and finds himself falling victim to a generational cycle of trauma and violence—not to mention the financial difficulties of post-prison life. A relic of a bygone generation of organized crime, The Janitor works for mobsters who are far younger than him—in a way, they represent who he once was. The Janitor must confront the consequences of his actions and either rise to the occasion as the hero of his own story, or remain complicit in the vicious cycle. This is a film about redemption and sacrifice; about righting one's wrongs. It is stories like these that encourage us to believe in the resilient power of the human spirit, even at our lowest.