Director's Works
Bête Noir, A Sacred Rebellion Neal Fagan
I am a director and photographer drawn to stories that uncover the extraordinary within the ordinary. As a self-taught filmmaker, I’ve built my career on intuition, curiosity, and a deep respect for the people and worlds I capture. My approach is fluid as I adapt to each project with fresh instincts rather than a fixed style, allowing me to move seamlessly between commercial work, documentary realism, and fiction. No matter the medium, my goal remains the same: to create images that don’t just look striking but feel deeply human.
This film started as a story about connecting sport and natural winemaking through a unified message, but it gradually shifted to a story about pace, the pace we force on ourselves, and the one our bodies keep telling us to return to.
While making it, I noticed the themes of the piece sneaking into the way I worked. I kept wanting to “solve” the film immediately, to have a clear idea of the direction we were going in from the beginning. Especially being my first project on 16mm, I felt a weight of responsibility to make sure this was all going to work out in the end. But the process kept asking me to slow down, to listen, and to trust that those answers will come along the way.
In a strange way, the film taught me the thing it’s trying to say: that patience isn’t losing or being lost, it’s an act of rebellion, it’s an act of devoted trust.
A quieter kind of strength.
