Filmmaking
Filmmaking
Photography is the foundation. Film extends the same way of seeing through time: every moving image is composed to stand as a photograph first, and the edit is built to reveal those images rather than spend them as illustration.
Geography comes before interpretation, observation before explanation. The narration says only what the images cannot. There is no music in any of the films — the sound is the place.
Current work
Asian Waters
Water as an organizing force in Southeast Asia. Three independent films, each on one water system and the life arranged around it — amphibious places, where land and water are not two things but one system in two states.
With Massimo Sarti.
The Sealed Waters
The karstic waters of Ha Long and Tam Coc
Inside the karst of Ha Long are lakes of sea water sealed when the ocean last rose, cut off from every current for thousands of years. Each has developed its own salinity, its own oxygen at depth, its own descendants of open-sea species.
The Long Threshold
The lagoons of Hue — an FAO project
A lagoon lies behind a barrier beach — still and interior on one side, open sea on the other. Fish cages and stake traps, rice and lotus on the ground the water leaves, tombs on former shorelines, the dunes, then the surf. The barrier is structural defence, not scenic margin, and it moves.
The Great Reversal
The flood-pulse of the Tonle Sap
Once a year a river turns and a lake grows several times its size. Everything around it is arranged by that reversal: the flooded forest that raises the fish, the silt that sets the rice, the villages that follow the water line.
In preparation
The Mekong
Two chapters, filming this coming winter, made as separate essays rather than one journey downstream: the reach above the Cambodian border where the river spreads across thousands of islands and falls, and the delta at the other end — the ground the river built, and the sediment that reaches it or no longer does.
Neither has a title yet. A title names a behaviour, and the behaviour has to be seen first.
Books
Where a place needs more room than a film gives it
A film holds a place for ten minutes. Some of these water systems have more in them than that — photographs that never entered a cut, and reasoning that belongs on a page rather than in narration. The first, on the lagoons of Hue and the FAO project that worked on them, is being written with Massimo Sarti.
Also, and separate from the chapters: Karst Lakes of Ha Long, an environmental research project.
Commissioned production
Global Conservation
Five documentary films made between 2020 and 2024 for Global Conservation, which works to protect endangered national parks and World Heritage sites. The subjects are the rangers and the patrols — what protection consists of on the ground, in Southeast Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans.
The collaboration began in 2018. The backstage shorts filmed alongside these films are on Vimeo.
The films are not stock and are not handled by an agency — only individual clips are, through Getty Images. For a screening, for broadcast, or to commission new work, write to info@pistolesiphoto.com.