Friends From Afar
A film for Compassion International

The problem

Compassion wanted kids to sponsor other kids. The hard part of that ask is distance, both the literal miles and the harder gap of imagination. It's tough for a ten-year-old in the U.S. to feel any real connection to a ten-year-old living a completely different life across the world. Abstract need doesn't move anyone. A specific kid does.

The film had one job: make a child watching feel like the child on the other side of the world wasn't a cause, but a friend.

What we did

We built it around one honest structure: two ten-year-old boys, a day in each of their lives, 2,400 miles apart. I followed Ian through an ordinary day in Colorado, then traveled to the Dominican Republic to film Alexander through his. Same rhythms, brushing teeth, heading to school, lunch, playing after, but very different worlds. Ian checks a watch so he isn't late; Alexander is careful not to swallow the tap water. The parallel does the work: a kid sees how alike the two boys are before they notice how different their circumstances are.

Then the payoff, which is what makes the film land. Ian and Alexander had been writing letters to each other for five years, and Ian's family flew down to meet him. We captured that first meeting, a hug, a translator helping them talk, and the two of them playing baseball in the yard with a bat made from a board and a ball made from a plastic bottle full of rocks. That's the whole message in one image: distance closed, two kids who are just friends.

I directed it, shot it, and cut it, in both English and Spanish. The Dominican Republic shoot was long and brutally hot, but that day-in-the-life footage is the heart of the film, and it had to be real, not staged sympathy.

The result

The film gave kids a specific person to connect with instead of an abstract cause. And the quiet proof of it: Compassion published it back in 2017, and it's still on their site today, years later. A piece that keeps working almost a decade after delivery is about the best result a film like this can have.