documentary film

I’ve been friends with the man pictured above for more than half a decade. It all started with a Craigslist search for my first motorcycle. 

I ran across an ad titled, “Faster than a raped ape, faster than a cheetah on cocaine.” I called him up and it spiraled from there…

Todd Kiergen is a rare man. He’s got a beard down to the middle of his chest that’s raggedy at the bottom because he keeps catching it in his drill press. He measures time in cigarettes. He’s got a stereo that hits stadium rock volume levels and I’ve seen some of his bikes fire three-foot flames out of their tail pipes. He can talk about compression ratios, valve clearance and various bike models until I’m totally lost, and then follow it up with a joke about racing an ugly woman to the light switch. I’ve never met anyone like him before. 

This originally appeared in Accent Magazine along with an essay that I wrote and some photographs. 

A couple weeks ago I flew out to Eugene Oregon to watch and document my first ever roller derby tournament. I was there shooting as part of a new film project called Talk Derby to Me. This is the resulting trailer for what will be an ongoing documentary project on roller derby, microbes and what it means to be human. 

If you’re interested you can read a bit more about the idea here:
Talk Derby to Me