Like most everyone making documentaries these days, I’ve been thinking more seriously about walking away from it all. Not in a dramatic way—just a slow loosening. Instead of resisting it, I’ve been letting it ask something of me. Not about film, exactly, but about the rest of it—what I’m paying attention to, what I’m curious about, what I’m quietly missing that I haven’t admitted yet.
I listened to an interview the other day with Bob Yeoman, Wes Anderson’s longtime DP. He was talking about how they find those perfectly composed shots. He said they go out looking for the most beautiful frame—that’s the easy part—and then they turn around and shoot in the opposite direction. I know it was mostly meant as a joke, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’ve been doing something similar, I think—not in how I shoot, but in how I live and think. Turning away from what’s familiar, just to see what else might be there. Not to be clever. Just to interrupt my own habits. To see differently.
That’s part of why I’ve been revisiting certain films—ones that don’t try so hard, that move in a quieter register. I watched Alamar again. When I sat down with it, I remembered how much it had lodged in me the first time. It’s so slight, so undemanding. A boy goes to stay with his father, a fisherman on the Banco Chinchorro reef. They live simply. Fish, swim, eat. Then the boy leaves. That’s it.
I’ve been working on a new narrative project about masculinity—what it means to live in a time when the old shapes have collapsed and nothing coherent has taken their place. Watching Alamar again, I noticed how little it pushes. It doesn’t explain or insist. It allows things to be observed without being translated. The relationship between father and son isn’t offered as evidence of anything. It just unfolds.
The film I’m working on isn’t offering answers—it’s circling a fracture. A man deep in a midlife crisis, hitting the limits of what once held him together. His old framework begins to crumble—and he begins, out of something closer to desperation than clarity, to consider another way. He begins to see that much of what he called his own—his ideas, his roles, his instincts—was inherited, absorbed, never examined. And that recognition arrives not as revelation, but as disorientation. The edges blur. The structure thins.
There’s something about the manosphere—Peterson, Tate, Rogan, all of it—that feels important to pay attention to, but not in the way people usually do. It’s not just ideology. It’s this structure. Or the illusion of it. These spaces give men somewhere to go, something to grip. But the structure is brittle. I keep thinking of that Emerson line: “The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.” That’s what it feels like. A whole generation reaching for stars that have been obscured.
And yet in Alamar, nothing needs to be said. The father doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t offer a blueprint for manhood. He just lives inside a context—his boat, his tools, the sea—and invites his son into it. That kind of unspoken competence, that wordless intimacy, feels so rare. I don’t want to romanticize it. But I do want to learn from it.
I’m thinking now about Antonio Machado’s poem, Is My Soul Asleep?
Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?
No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
That’s where Alamar lives, I think. Not as escape, but as threshold. A place where you can start to feel the shape of what you’ve been missing, even if you can’t name it yet.
The film lives there, in that silence—not as a place to escape from, but as a kind of threshold. A place where a man might begin, finally, to feel the shape of his own longing. Not for answers, but for presence. Not to be whole, but to be here.
That’s what Alamar offered, too. There’s a way it moves that reminded me of something I’ve been trying to hold onto in my own work. It doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t dramatize. It trusts the viewer to come close—not with the intellect, but with the body. To feel the wind shift through the mangroves, or the weight of a fish as it’s pulled from the water. It’s a film that’s already let go of the need to convince you of anything. It just is.
And maybe that’s part of what made it feel so essential to me—especially now, when so many of our cultural narratives about masculinity (and everything else) feel exhausted, brittle, over-theorized. We’re in a moment of redefinition, or at least disorientation. There’s a lot being said about what men are lacking, what they’re doing wrong, what they’re being drawn into. It’s not my place to diagnose it. But I do notice, in my own small corner of things, that there’s a hunger beneath all of it. A longing, not just for direction, but for grounding. For presence. For a sense of how to simply be.
Watching the film, I thought about how rarely we see fatherhood depicted this way—wordless, competent, intimate without being sentimental. And I thought, too, about how much pressure we place on men to be something when maybe what’s needed is simply permission to belong. Not to an ideal or an identity, but to a place. To a rhythm. To something that doesn’t have to be proven.
That’s my read, anyway. I’m not suggesting this film has answers. I don’t think it wants to. But it opened up something in me. A reminder, maybe, of a different way of moving through the world—less reactive, more attuned. I grew up far from the Caribbean, far from fishing boats and coral reefs, and yet the film evoked a kind of memory in me. A memory of what it might feel like to learn by watching, to rest without explanation, to be close to someone without always needing language.
I don’t mean to suggest this is some kind of universal ideal. We all come to these questions differently, and carry different histories in our bodies. But for me, Alamar feels like a film that clears the static.
I’ve been trying, in both my work and my life, to pare things back to what feels elemental. What remains when you strip away the noise. Not because I think clarity is pure, or that silence is inherently noble. But because it’s where I tend to hear the most.
This isn’t a recommendation, exactly. Just a note about a film that moved me. A film that reminded me of what it feels like to sit with something, and let it change the weather inside you. Quietly. Slowly. Without asking anything in return.