Director’s Statement

Things Between Heaven and Earth

The film begins in a theatre, where a writer prepares to speak publicly about his latest book. His words are rehearsed, precise, even self-protective. As he is interviewed, we see him walking silently into a church in London. What appears to be a memory is not the past, but the future. The man has returned home, summoned to meet his estranged father, a meeting arranged at the same church he once fled.

But the encounter never comes. What follows is not a story of reconciliation or healing. Instead, the man is left waiting. He sits with memory, with spiritual absence, and with the private reckoning of someone who cannot let go of something he no longer believes in.

The book he has just published shares the film’s title: Things Between Heaven and Earth. In that novel, its characters are caught in a kind of limbo, trapped between meaning and meaninglessness, belief and its absence. The man is no different. He wanders a purgatory on earth, suspended between the father he once feared and the God who no longer answers.

The film is structured across two registers. In one, the man is seen in public, articulate and composed, presenting his thoughts to an audience. In the other, he waits alone in silence. These threads are not arranged as explanation or flashback. They exist like echoes: one spoken, the other endured. Between them lingers the question of faith, not as belief, but as silence.

In the final moments, the man senses a presence. He looks up, as if seen, as if searching for something beyond himself. But what he finds is his own shadow, fractured and still. He does not find comfort. He finds clarity. And yet, he leaves the candle burning. That act, small but deliberate, suggests a longing that remains. He knows no one is coming. Still, something in him refuses to stop asking.

I am drawn to dialogue that is exacting, but not always sincere. Characters hold control through language, yet contradict themselves in pursuit of something they cannot name. The performances are restrained. The composition is formal. My influences are filmmakers who use discipline to shape emotion without simplifying it: the moral architecture of Michael Haneke, the spiritual unease of Todd Field, the metaphysical geometry of Stanley Kubrick. I work with rhythm, duration, and silence to hold tension that does not resolve. What interests me is not catharsis, but proximity: to grief, to doubt, to what remains when faith has faded.

This is a film about absence, but not emptiness. It observes what lingers after hope has been exhausted.