One rainy summer night I was riding my old mountain bike home from a birthday party in Brooklyn. Fifth avenue deep in Sunset Park was slick from the rain and I faced twin problems of oblivious cars and my own warped faculties.

Nevertheless I felt that my skills and experience as a cyclist would prevail against outside forces. They always did.
But that night I felt—suddenly it seemed—as if my life was in jeopardy and an unknown, unseen force was going to dismantle me.

I made it home safe but the sense that a predetermined fate awaited me pervaded. I tried to sleep but the feverish terror would not subside as a vivid narrative played in my head. This is what I saw:

A bike messenger is dropping off a package in an art gallery and decides to browse. At one point she comes upon a photograph taken from a distance of a car/bike accident. Looking closer and closer at the small images she sees… herself pinned beneath the car. Stunned, she realizes that she's half-awake in a hospital and dying.

That night I wrote the fever dream into a five page script which eventually became this film. Over time I developed the bike messenger and gave her a place she formerly called home (Small Town, Iowa) and a story line that was more a character study of her life in New York.

The underpinnings remained: it was a tragedy, fate was around all corners, death comes unseen, skills, experience and the brightness of youth might not overcome them and sometimes you can sense when your own death is nigh.

I wanted a sense of authenticity to be part of the movie and knew that the high-stakes action of a real bike messenger had to be captured. Initially I tried to find a real messenger for the lead but that was impossible. It took me half a year to find Joanna, an actress but non-cyclist (I had to train her on the bike).

Therefore I cast several non-actors in critical parts of the movie to bring alive the mise-en-scene. This included Yatika Fields, JT and Scott Klocksin among others. I had them write their own dialogue for parts of the film.

I wanted to show four seasons to mimic the stages of life that Kaya was going through (including a wintery death) so we shot spring and summer in Southern New Jersey, Saratoga Springs and Mid-Hudson Valley as substitutions for Iowa, and fall and winter in New York.
From conception to completion this film took about three years.
The original cut of the film left the question open as to whether she had lived or died but the answer was pretty clear to me—she had died.

After the cast and crew screening and much wine the end of the night left me alone with two artists, both painters—Yatika Fields and Alex Itin. I asked them if they thought she died in the accident—if maybe it was too tragic?

Both of them responded the same. They said the circle of life continued. She never died, her spirit was too strong. Yatika, of Cherokee and Cree heritage, believed that she had lived because her dedication and love for her bike was never taken away.

In that vein it is my hope that the spirit of this film carries on outside of it.