Mayfly

As any parent can tell you, having a child changes everything. For me, fatherhood introduced a whole new set of anxieties: Will I be a good father? Will I live long enough to see my daughter grow to womanhood? Will I be able to keep her safe? We like to imagine ourselves as heroes, but what if there was something I couldn’t protect her from? Could I live with that failure? Would I be able to go on? With this film, I wanted to address the reality of living in a world where such fears are all too real and must be dealt with.

I wrote this film with Katrina Law in March, 2022, went straight into preproduction, shot it in June, and flew through the postproduction process, thanks to the kind of good fortune for which one can only hope. Our entire team brought their A game from start to finish, which made this one of the most fulfilling collaborations I’ve ever been a part of.

In every instance, we tried to base the film in reality, and strove for emotional honesty. I’ve always felt that the most successful films are the ones that, even when they take us to fantastical places, have characters that are genuine and relatable, and stories that are based on real human experience. Similarly, the camerawork should always serve the story. Here, this is reflected in the increasingly erratic visuals – which move from stable and controlled to handheld and claustrophobic – as the lead character’s world collapses around him and his foundations are rocked by self-realization.

My hope is that audiences will be touched by the film, and even more that they will be moved to look at their own lives with greater kindness, openness and forgiveness. It’s important to remember that not everybody processes grief and trauma in the same way. Nobody is perfect. But it’s not until we’re honest with ourselves that we can truly begin to heal.