I'm recording this in Białystok, Poland, in an apartment someone donated to this film.

I've been asked why I'm making this documentary. Maybe you're curious too. So I tried to come up with a thoughtful answer, something about history, about preservation, about justice. They're all good reasons. They all felt forced.

The only honest answer I had was,

it just felt like the right thing to do.

Then I thought about it. That's not the first time I've said that.

I was in college for graphic design, classroom after classroom of design students, and one day I'm walking down the hall and there's a sign: "Do you want to make movies?"

I stopped.

Movies.

I didn't know a single person making movies. I was literally surrounded by people going to be graphic designers.

So I picked up a camera.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Eventually I landed at GrahamSpencer, an agency I'd looked up to for years. Steady paycheck, challenging projects, a smart and talented team. Comfortable. But comfortable was costing me purpose. I didn't want to make work that kept me fed. I wanted to make work driven by the fire inside me, work that could radiate past me, past Rockford.

So I left.

It was scary. I did it anyway.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Here's the thing about me. When I see something that could be done, my first thought is "somebody should do something about that." And then eventually I realize that somebody is probably me.

That's how Our City, Our Story started.

I was tired of watching Rockford get reduced to crime statistics and bad headlines. I knew a different city. Full of artists. Dreamers. Musicians. Oddballs. And builders. All of them genuine, all of them generous.

So I told their stories the way I wished somebody would tell them.

At first hundreds of thousands, then millions of people watched.

Fast Company called me a Branding Vigilante. Their words for someone who didn't wait for permission.

Opportunities followed, and one of them needed me to move to New York. And I mean, I love New York. But in New York I'd be one more director in a city full of them. Rockford is where my work means something. I felt my hometown still needed to have someone tell her stories.

So I stayed.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Then COVID took the thing I loved. I love sitting with people for hours, letting their story tell me how it needs to be told, and suddenly I couldn't. Our City, Our Story went on the shelf.

I was terrified. I had no idea what I was going to do.

During quarantine my girlfriend at the time came home with paint and canvases and said, "We're gonna paint." So we covered the kitchen in plastic and turned it into a studio. I posted some paintings online.

Someone bought one.

Then another. Then another.

Then another.

And almost all of them said the same thing, that they'd never owned a real painting before.

I liked that. I decided that's who I want to paint for, so I keep my prices affordable.

It felt like the right thing to do.

Now more than 400 people have bought my paintings.

One morning I saw a headline. A World War II painting had surfaced in Rockford, bought out of the back of a pickup truck for seventy-five dollars.

It was painted by a Polish Jewish artist, one of the Copyists of the Białystok Ghetto, twenty artists forced to paint copies for a Nazi officer who sold their work and pocketed the money. They hoped it would keep them alive.

They were murdered anyway.

This painting could be the only one in existence. Only one of supposedly hundreds.

Tim and Sarah found it. They run an oddities and antiques shop. He makes sculptures with bones taken from animal carcasses. Yeah.

Ya know, stories that touch on the Holocaust usually ask how ordinary people become monsters. This one follows a man who builds monsters from bones, and asks why he chose to do the right thing.

The right thing, as they saw it, was returning the painting back to where it was painted, in Białystok, Poland.

Now,
I'm a painter.
I'm Polish.
I speak Polish.
I've been to Poland ten times.
My own family was scarred by the Nazis.
And I tell stories about remarkable people from Rockford.

Every random piece of my life came together.

I had been preparing for this story long before I knew it existed.

They were leaving in two weeks.

I had no funding, no outline, no idea what I was walking into. All I knew was that if I didn't film this moment, I'd regret it forever. So I emptied my savings and followed them to Poland.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Since then I've been welcomed into archives, into museums, into people's homes. I've been given places to stay. And that trust didn't come from being Polish. They saw I wasn't there to take something from them. They saw I care about the people I tell stories of, so I've been treated like family, which means lots of Polish food.

I realized this story can't be told in ten minutes.

Everything I've built has come from stories under ten minutes.

I can only imagine what will happen when I have a hundred more.

This isn't me asking anyone to fund a whole film. I'm raising sixty five thousand dollars in seed funding to develop this properly: a trailer, story development, and the materials that attract the right producer. That's the work that turns a story I'm chasing into a film a producer and a festival can say yes to.

The story is real.
The access is real.
The trust is real.

And it's ours.

No other city on earth can claim this story. It surfaced in Rockford. It was carried here from Rockford.

I'm inviting you, as a son of Rockford, to come make it with me.

Then someday, when someone sees your name on the film and asks you why you decided to help make it, you might smile and say,

"It just felt like the right thing to do."