08/25/2026
sARVAM has officially won Best Documentary and Best Nature Film at the 2026 Bangkok Movie Awards. 🙏🏾🏆
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The film is still making its way through the festival circuit, with a number of submissions still under consideration, but I wanted to finally share a little more about what this film actually is.
sARVAM follows Pino, a fisherman in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.
There is no narrator explaining Pino to you. No interview telling you what to think about him. No voice guiding you toward a conclusion. You simply spend time with him, his environment, his work, the ocean, and the other lives that intersect with his own.
That choice sometimes surprises people. When we hear “documentary,” many of us immediately think of 60 Minutes, reality television, talking heads, interviews, or a narrator carrying us through the story. But documentary filmmaking has several different modes and approaches.
Two that increasingly define my own work are observational and poetic filmmaking, with cinéma vérité informing the observational side. With sARVAM, I began hybridizing these approaches. Rather than explain the meaning of what you’re seeing, I want to create the conditions for you to observe, experience, and arrive at meaning yourself.
That fits directly into what I am discovering as my own filmmaking philosophy. I’m less interested in telling you what something means than I am in placing you close enough to another life that, for a few minutes, the separation between their experience and your experience becomes a little less certain.
sARVAM means all, everything, the whole.
And Pino’s seemingly simple story became an opportunity to explore exactly that.
If you’d like to watch the film, I’ll put the FilmFreeway screening link in my story. The film is currently password protected while it continues through festivals, but DM me and I’ll send you the password.
More soon. 🤞🏾🎥
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