I moved to Tres Orejas, an off-grid community outside Taos, New Mexico, in 2022. The landscape here is unlike anywhere else I've lived — homes plant themselves in a sea of sagebrush, some large, some small, some cobbled together, some just RVs. One tiny house in particular, no more than six by twelve feet, caught my curiosity early on. That curiosity is where this film started: I saw an old man hitchhiking outside that house one day and pulled over. That man was Jeff Mabry, and getting to know him became Jeff's Way.
I approached the film as something like a personal journal — a simple, moving portrait, built more from accumulation than argument. My interests in documentary portraiture, photography, and durational cinema shaped how I worked: slow, observational, patient. My day job has me doing profile work constantly; this was the project I needed for myself, driven by my own curiosity rather than an assignment.
As I began assembling the film, I fell in love with certain things Jeff would say — about art, science, humanity, whatever came up. But the more I worked with the footage, the clearer it became that, as much as I loved those musings, they weren't his story. So I started cutting away anything superfluous to the real one: a man reflecting on his life, on the obsession with money and power that once drove him, and on how that obsession seemed to fuel his depression.
Aesthetically, I wanted the film to feel like a moving portrait. A newfound interest in photography, which grew out of my recent work as an educator, shaped how it looks — the compositions are simple and patient. I wanted the film to sound and look like it does out here: quiet, monolithic.
Jeff and I started talking, and I asked him who he was and about his life. He was more than happy to oblige. I was careful not to let him become a symbol of anything — he's too specific and too contradictory a man for that. But there's something genuinely hopeful in hearing him talk about letting go of the money and power he spent a life chasing, and finding something steadier in its place. We're still friends today. I still give him rides to and from town.
