I learned to direct by living first.

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There's something about displacement that teaches you to see stories everywhere. When you've moved enough times, when you've been the outsider looking in more often than you've belonged, you start to recognize that everyone is carrying invisible narratives. Life becomes this intricate web of layered stories, each transition peeling back another truth about resilience, about identity, about what it means to belong nowhere and everywhere at once.

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My real film school wasn't a classroom (yet) it was the front seat driving Uber in Miami.

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Over thousands of rides, I became a collector of human moments. The man fresh out of jail, hands still shaking as he told me his plans to start over. The Cuban woman whose voice broke when she described watching parents drown with their children while crossing rivers to reach America. An Italian attorney working as a waitress, her dreams feeling impossibly distant in the fluorescent glow of late-night diners. Corporate executives in thousand-dollar suits would slide into my backseat and crumble, revealing struggles hidden behind polished facades. Then there was the seventeen-year-old girl who got in my car with a kitchen knife, bruised and distraught from violence I couldn't begin to understand.

 

The businessman who'd traveled to Brazil seeking ayahuasca, thinking he was just exploring the unknown, only to discover through multiple ceremonies and even frog poison that his own childhood trauma was poisoning his relationship with his son, sometimes the most put together people carry the deepest wounds. The man who quietly shared his story of childhood sexual assault and how it led to contracting HIV, his voice barely above a whisper as he processed decades of shame and survival.

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But it wasn't all heavy confessions. Sometimes these encounters became unexpected adventures. A group of visitors from New York asked about the best clubs in Miami, and their infectious energy convinced me to abandon my shift and join them for a night of spontaneous connection. We became genuine friends, and they invited me to their hotel pool party the next day, proof that sometimes the best stories happen when you're willing to step outside your routine.

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Another group asked for the best strip club, and somehow they convinced me to join them after dropping them off, where I met an exotic dancer whose authenticity cut through all pretense. We connected instantly and remain close friends to this day. Each passenger carried entire universes of experience, and most were desperate to be heard, to be seen, to matter to someone, even a stranger they'd never encounter again.

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These weren't just conversations; they were masterclasses in human complexity. I learned that judgment is the enemy of understanding, that every person's actions are rooted in histories we can't see, circumstances we haven't lived. The businessman struggling with addiction, the refugee rebuilding her life from nothing, the teenager making choices that seem destructive but are actually survival strategies—each story expanded my capacity for empathy and deepened my understanding of what drives human behavior. This became my foundation—storytelling grounded in reality but elevated by a deeper comprehension of what these experiences actually mean.

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But the seeds of this approach were planted much earlier. Growing up, my stepfather taught me something that would shape everything. When he made me take apart a computer completely and rebuild it, I panicked: "I don't know how!" He smiled with that patient certainty that comes from lived wisdom: "You will figure it out. Even in life, you'll always find a way."

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Hours later, when the screen finally flickered to life, I understood something profound. Trust yourself. Be patient with the process. Embrace mistakes as teachers. Keep going when it gets hard. That lesson became my approach to everything—from creating original scores for some of my films to navigating the complex moral territories of the stories I choose to tell. I refuse to be contained by genres because life refuses to be contained by categories.

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What draws me to a story isn't market research or industry trends—it's the emotional truth of a moment that most people would rather not examine too closely. In Test of Time, I follow Afua, a Kenyan refugee whose journey from war-torn chaos to small-town Alabama forces audiences to wrestle with their assumptions about trauma, mental illness, and the complex relationship between understanding and forgiveness.

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When Afua, overwhelmed by untreated trauma and postpartum psychosis, makes a choice that horrifies society, the film doesn't ask audiences to condone her actions. It asks them to understand the cascade of circumstances that led to that moment—to sit with the uncomfortable truth that we are all capable of more than we want to admit when pushed beyond our limits.

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This is where I believe the film industry has become dangerously disconnected from the very life it's trying to capture. Too many filmmakers are writing from research instead of experience, creating content instead of art. But real stories don't live in focus groups or trend reports. They live in the streets, in people's unguarded moments, in the spaces between what we say and what we actually mean.

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Every person I've encountered, from the backseat confessions to the childhood lessons, has shown me that we're all trying to survive and make sense of our lives with whatever resources we have. Some of us have better resources than others. Some of us carry heavier burdens. But the fundamental human experience of struggling to understand ourselves and our place in the world? That's universal.

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This is why everything I create comes from one central belief: knowing yourself is the only thing worth knowing, because every authentic story you tell begins with understanding your own. My multicultural background, my experiences with displacement and survival, my thousands of conversations with strangers, all of this has taught me that authentic storytelling requires authentic living. 

 

You can't fake depth. You can't manufacture empathy. You can't write truth you haven't somehow touched.

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The stories that have shaped me continue to shape the stories I tell. Each film becomes an invitation, not just to see, but to understand. Not just to judge, but to recognize the shared humanity in choices we might never make but could, under different circumstances, find ourselves facing.

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This is the cinema I'm committed to creating: films that transform both maker and audience, that challenge assumptions while honoring the complexity of human experience, that find light in darkness without pretending the darkness doesn't exist.

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If you value partnerships that explore the unexpected, that dig beneath surface narratives to find the beating heart of what it means to be human, then perhaps we have stories to tell together just contact me. 

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warm regards,