ORIGINS

Summer 1997, I graduate college with a degree in scriptwriting for Film.  I have an extremely unrewarding job doing “data entry”, transcribing reams of printed credit card transactions onto spreadsheets.

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One of my Buddhist friends suggests: why don’t you get a job as a care-giver? 

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September 11th, 2001.  I just graduated nursing school.  My first day at work as a new RN is on a cancer ward at a hospital in London.  I watch the Twin Towers fall on a patient’s television screen.  One.  Then another. 

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April, 2011.  I am now a US citizen.  I have a well-paid job looking after movie stars and politicians.  I’m recently divorced, living in a tiny shack in the mountains outside of Santa Monica. I make a radical decision and quit my job to enlist in the US Army.

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April, 2014.  I am 41.  I deploy to Afghanistan as an Army Ranger.

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January 2015.  During a night-time mission, after jumping out of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules my static line becomes entangled with my arm and I am briefly towed by the plane which is traveling at 150mph.  My left pectoralis muscle is ripped from the bone.  Despite this, after landing I continue with the 4-day mission treating other Rangers for hypothermia, frost-bite and concussion.   I get a medal.

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September 2019.  I’ve been out of the military for 4-years.  I return to school using my VA benefits to pursue an MFA in Film with the Akira Kurosawa School of Filmmaking.  That same year, my documentary about ocean therapy (Lodestar) wins awards on the festival circuit, including my old stomping ground – the Topanga Film Festival. 

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April 2020.  I make the short film, WOKE, for my residential film project.

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July, 2021.  WOKE goes on the big screen at the Oregon Scream Week Horror Film Festival.

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Current day.  The boundaries between dystopian horror and reality continue to blur.

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“My camera is like a gun.” ~ Viktor Kossakovsy