In the spring of 2020, my father passed away from a rare brain condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In the space of 6 months, the disease took his ability to walk, to speak, and finally, his life.

Watching my Dad slowly fade away was the most difficult thing I’ve experienced in my life and it changed my perspective on life in a
deep way. In 2022, I decided to write a script that explored the experience.

I grew up camping with my Dad in the Pacific Northwest and my love of nature is very tied to memories of my Dad so a camping trip in the woods seemed like the most fitting place to tell the story.

A few months later, I brought the script to my best friend and directing partner Connor Hair who knew my Dad well. We talked through the script and decided to produce and direct it together.

Farewell Fire is a story about life, death, and the perspective that nature gives us on how to live. There’s something about staring up at a tree that’s hundreds of years older than you that really puts your life into perspective in a powerful way. That was the feeling we wanted to bring to this story about the passing of the torch between generations. We wanted to explore how brief and fleeting our lives are and what that tells us about how we should live.

While any story about loss comes with sadness, we didn’t that to be the end of this story. Losing my Dad was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, but it also changed the way that I look at life. It reminded me that our lives are short and that we should live them fully and in the moment. This was the feeling we wanted to leave the audience with, a sense of hope and possibility for a new generation to carry the human story forward.