When people ask what I do, I answer promptly “I make documentaries”. But it’s the question that usually follows that always catches me off guard. “What kind of documentaries?” Luckily, here, I can sort of get away without answering, and you can check out the work I do straight away.
So let me go back to the first answer, the one I give with little hesitation: “I make documentaries”. I’m very comfortable with that answer, because I do feel that making
documentaries is representative of myself, even aside from being a profession, it reflects my identity: documentaries are a way for me to discover more about the world around me and myself.
I was lucky enough to realize this early on. In my teens I found out that holding a camera was the perfect excuse to approach interesting people and delve into their stories. This is how I started making short films about unusual characters, like the world’s biggest toy collector or the inventor of the smallest camera ever made.
These were among my very first attempts at documentary filmmaking. And although what I do now has grown distant from those first films, I recognize that the core of what I do hasn’t changed.
I’m still drawn to people. I still use my camera as a pretext to connect in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Yet, as much as I like the idea of identifying with my job, and as much as I find the creative process thrilling, there’s so much more than that. There’s nothing I enjoy more than long distance hikes, taking it slow, leaving the camera behind to see and experience the world directly.