I remember being oddly intimidated when Colin and Laurie asked me to be a mentor for the Directing Breakdown. I assumed it was because I had never done this before. Or perhaps because I was already carrying the cumulative nerves for a film pitch competition I had later that month, another thing I felt unprepared for. By the time I was on the train to the workshop, I was genuinely terrified. I found it curious: why did this opportunity feel so particularly frightening?
When I thought back to my beginnings in film school, it began to make sense. Almost ten years to the day, I was a novice, new to the film world and its syntax. I arrived deeply in love with films, but unaware of how to translate that love into anything of my own. I remember feeling acutely alert in that environment - hanging on to every word that came out of anyone’s mouth, embodying every assignment, soaking up the good, and especially the bad. I traced my current nervousness back to that feeling. I understood the weight of words in a teaching space. When guiding someone through this process and its language, it’s shockingly easy not just to be unhelpful, but inadvertently harmful.
I wish I were better prepared, but I was already here, walking into the room with a familiar feeling, like walking onto set. No matter how many times you’ve done it, it always feels like the first day: shaky, unsure, pretending until you figure it out.
But this room was warm. It was clearly carefully designed by people who understood the weight of those words, and the energy one should bring into a teaching environment. From the moment I entered, I sensed an inherent, equal hierarchy in the space, despite the varying degrees of experience or expertise. I noticed the diversity in taste, style, and approach, and how easily everyone melded into a oneness. I was immediately less tense.
Meeting my directing mentees was energizing. To me, directing is profoundly individual and human, grounded in intuition and empathy. The exchange of vulnerabilities is what shapes character, conflict, and drama. It’s an amalgamation of who you are and what you want to say- and when that happens, the environment around you folds into the shape of your vision. This is exactly how both of my mentees showed up: nervous yet fearless, vulnerable enough to learn yet deeply self-assured. The first job of a director is to transfer your excitement to others, to inspire people toward a shared vision, and I watched them do exactly that.
We experienced a beautiful moment of teaching when an intuitive, bright actor became resistant to their character during rehearsal. I realized that the resistance wasn’t born of misunderstanding, but of proximity, of having too much in common with the role. I realized we needed to do for the actor what I was also trying to do for myself: confront a personal fear, and see it from a new perspective. My mentees and I came up with the idea to ask the actors to switch roles, to step back and create a bit of distance from their characters. It not only worked, but created a trust and intimacy that carried onto set the following day. In that moment, I understood teaching was a simple pleasure to chase: helping someone figure something out, seeing them finally nail it, and fall in love with the work, just as I once did in film school.
What I took away in those few days at Kashif will always stay with me. I relearned that the best way to teach is to remain a student, allowing myself to learn all over again. From my mentees, I learned how to show up despite fear: to be present, open, and to trust myself as a director. From the wonderful people who ran the workshop - Laurie, Colin, Bianca, Annalise, Adesola - I learned that films are made within a community, and that if you do right by yourself and your vision, you inevitably make something that moves others. I learned what it means to be held by a process, and to hold others with care.
The following week, I walked into a very different, far more intimidating room of jurors to pitch my own work. I carried this experience with me. And I found myself undaunted. I had the courage to show up simply as myself.
