... Some people have a fire burning so hot that it singes the edges of their life. Relationships, passions, work, the fire touches everything, and unknown at first to that person, it begins to steer the very course of their life. It’s as if they are stumbling through darkness, chasing the only thing they can see: a fire, offering warmth and security, ahead of them, calling to them.

There was a tornado warning in December. I heard it on the radio as I drove from coffee shop to coffee shop in downtown Durham. The long, drawn-out beeping followed by the mechanical voice of the national weather service issuing commands to shelter in place interrupted Sublime’s “Santeria” playing on 96.1 out of the worn-down speakers of my 2005 Toyota Corolla.

It’s the kind of morning that only happens in late summer: a chilled breeze breaks an otherwise torpid heat. The air carries scents of a few recently fallen leaves. Grey skies give way to a darker horizon where lightning flashes before I’ve had a sip of my first cup of coffee.

This documentary started roughly ten years ago, when I first met Tony Johnson… I was studying at Duke University doing whatever the heck 20-year-old boys do while "studying" at Duke (in my case: I drank a lot and read a lot), and one Saturday afternoon I found my way into a dance studio off East Campus.

Senior Night is an experiment in style. It sets out to answer a specific question: What would a documentary look like if all details were to stay inside a very strict narrative frame without any political, moral, psychological, or cultural context being supplied by the filmmaker?

There's a lot more that can be said about this project than will be said in this short post. The complex experience of my grandfather living as a half-Jewish person under the Third Reich deserves a whole book, which I may write one day.

I produced this short film alongside two of my closest childhood friends, Matt Brondoli and Zach Goldberg. We had just graduated college and somehow found our way into a little bit of money (long story that I may write about another time) to produce a film about a charity in Maidenhead.