Manifesto

In 1968 the Apollo 8 crew saw Earth from the outside, whole, for the first time in human history. Many of the crews came back changed: borders looked invented, conflicts looked small. A writer later gave it a name, the overview effect: a lasting shift in perspective that comes from seeing the whole instead of the fragment.

You can't send every viewer to orbit. A film does a smaller version of the same thing: two hours in a dark room, and you walk out seeing your own life from a slightly different altitude.

I want to make films that earn the attention twice. Once while you're watching, and once a couple of days later when something from the story comes back and rearranges the day.

I was born in Chișinău on September 10, 1982. When the Transnistria war broke out, my family left for Kurgan, a city on the edge of Siberia. I was nine. That is where I grew up, studied and built everything that came before film.

I finished a finance degree in 2006 and a second degree in 2008. The year of the first diploma I started a transport company, and it grew to about 350 people. A construction company followed around 2013, then a tech startup. On weekends I raced cars, and in January 2015 I won the Governor's Cup of the Kurgan region in track racing. On packed snow. Siberia doesn't do dry tracks.

Somewhere in there I hit the ceiling that money doesn't solve. In 2015 I moved to Vancouver to work in film, and I had sold the businesses by 2016.

Vancouver was a restart from zero. I fixed my English, signed with an acting agent and started auditioning. On set I worked as a production assistant, in grip and electric, and in the accounting department. No film school: courses on film financing, Canadian incentives and distribution instead, plus a TV pilot script that picked up a few festival prizes. Then short films and music videos. Then features.

The first two, “Ruthless Bastards” and “Pitfall”, were the proving run: financed, shot in Vancouver, sold internationally, one of them with investors fully recouped, their money back in full, the other in AMC Theatres. They taught me the machine end to end.

Apsis Pictures is the studio that grew out of those films: the same discipline, a higher tier of script and cast. Four elevated genre films are in development, with “Lookout” as film #1.

The four questions get asked before pre-production: who is this for, how do they hear about it, what's the recoupment path, what could kill it. Soft answers mean the film hasn't been thought through yet.

Cast first. Without recognizable faces, the international sales door doesn't open. With them, a smaller film can travel. This is exactly the approach behind “Lookout”, our next film, shooting 2027.

Lean production. AI tools in pre-vis, marketing tests, casting comps. Not as a brand position. Just to make better films cheaper.

Tax credits, done right. Structuring a film so the Canadian refund comes back at full strength, real money returned on what you spend here, is a core skill, and the reason producers bring their films to shoot in British Columbia with me.