Amazon rejected it, so for this weekend only I'm releasing Zona Seyl for free on Vimeo on Demand. Just use the promocode: Zombie until Monday morning. Happy with this one, it's wild and slow and hypnotic. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/zonaseyl

What's Zona Seyl, I can hear one or two of you asking? Well i'll tell you...
In 2012 I watched an adaptation of Award winning author Ryōtarō Shiba's novel Castle of Owls, directed by the great Eiichi Kudo. Kudo you may know as the guy who directed the original 13 Assassins...

Kudo was a marvel, a kind of Japanese Andre De Toth, someone who worked best in black and white but was no slouch in colour. His samurai vengeance trilogy (13 Assassins, The Grand Killing, and Eleven Samurai) is beyond belief, crazy good, elegant and bleakly violent work.

His Castle of Owls is a nifty tightrope, a navigation of the concerns of the Jidai-geki and the contemplative tone of Ryōtarō Shiba's writing. In it, there's a scene where a samurai contemplates walking away from a mission because it'll put him at odds with his lover.

In the translation I had access to when I saw the film, the hero tells a story about a man similarly caught between a rock and a hard place, duty and love, honor and freedom. He says that a man given the same choice simply couldn't decide and died soon after.

He was then reincarnated as a bridge for a hundred years. I took the meaning to be: he would learn the lesson the hard way what it means to have people literally need to depend on you and failing. A bridge cannot fail if it's built strongly enough, you can always lean on it.

I saw this and was immediately inspired. "That's my next movie!" The next day I drove around Bucks county looking for a suitable bridge. After 24 hours of driving around I found one in Tyler Park in Newtown, PA, and started filming in a kind of fugue state.

I shot that bridge as often as I could, with all of the important people in my life (actors, friends, girlfriends) between 2012 and 2018. I came back all the time, I memorized that bridge. I shot it in every season and from every angle.

My dear friend and fake sister Theo Blasko and I shot the early pre-industrial stuff where we show the first life a man who loses his love to circumstance. My friends Kate Acosta and Kellianne Hamburg played the reincarnated couple. We shot the last scene in November of 2018...

This is important for a few reasons. I'd decided that the house where the couple would reunite would be my grandmother's, a place I had many fond memories of from childhood. I filmed her in 2017. She became too ill to live on her own and was moved to a home in summer of 2018.

My mom and her sisters put the house on the market in September so I had exactly as long as it took someone to buy the house to shoot the finale, in which my heroine sits in the same chair as my grandmother to connote the passage of time/generations.

In one of those miracles that seem to assail me when I try to make art, Kate and Kellianne were both available to shoot the same day in November. Kellianne drove down and got us, we drove from Queens to Doylestown, PA & we shot at the bridge with the last few minutes of daylight.

I knew in my hear this would probably be the last time I saw this bridge. In my few year absence they'd reinforced it and it looked like it was a matter of time before they just demolished the thing and built a new one. It was oddly sad and exhilarating to say goodbye.

Then Kellianne and Kate and I shot the final scene, the reunion of two lovers who'd been separated by over a hundred years and many corporeal forms. I had until that night to get it right because the house was going to belong to someone else soon. It was a miracle.

We got it. I went home, edited the footage into a shape I liked, then sat at the piano, hit record and improvised along with it, scoring it live in another fugue state. When I was done, the movie was done. By some miracle I'd done work I loved. I didn't have to change anything.

Zona Seyl's view of reincarnation is probably not traditional and I don't mean for it to be some catch-all buddhist thing, it was kind of my version of things, my pie-in-the-sky hope that the cosmos looks out for us, which I also suspect it doesn't, but alas. This was my dream.

Eight years later, featuring a host of people I rarely see anymore and the most personally emotional climax of any of my works that was this close to not happening, I'm just...stunned this exists. So it would mean a lot to me if you watched it. I hope you like it.

There's a little Tarkovsky, a little Akerman, a little German Jr, a little Hutton, a little Reichardt, if any of that appeals to you.

My grandmother passed late last year and I’ll never live in Doylestown again. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.