A Man Imagined

About the Filmmakers

Melanie Shatzky and Brian M. Cassidy are collaborative artists working at the intersection of documentary and narrative cinema. Their films have screened at the Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno and Rotterdam film festivals, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, Le Musée de la Civilisation, ICA London, The Museum of the Moving Image, The Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, and Lincoln Center. They’ve won numerous awards for their work and have held fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and IFP. Their feature debut, Francine, starring Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, was called “raw, intimate and observed with penetrating acuity” by The Hollywood Reporter and was selected as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Their documentary, The Patron Saints, was called “one of the most powerful Canadian documentaries of recent years” by POV Magazine.

Cassidy & Shatzky also maintain an active photography practice and have had their work featured in GUP Magazine, Der Greif, ZEITmagazin, It’s Nice That, Wired, FlakPhoto, and Slate, among others. In 2015, The Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) invited the duo to guest curate “A Photographer’s Eye: Photography & The Poetic Documentary”, a special program about the intersection of photography and documentary film, which was showcased at La Cinémathèque Québécoise. Both Cassidy & Shatzky hold an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Directors’ Statement

We met Lloyd after having volunteered at a local shelter for the better part of a year. Our initial intention was to make a film with multiple characters, and create a panoramic of those experiencing homelessness. Upon meeting Lloyd, all of that changed. He approached us, intrigued by our camera and our presence at the shelter, quietly asserting his desire to partake in our project. He had an almost biblical aura that was unmistakable, and a need, however covert, to be seen.

It was February of 2020, mere weeks before the whole world would shut down. Then, unexpectedly, Melanie’s sister passed away just days after having met Lloyd. He was the last person we saw before her passing, and the first person we saw after she had passed. We would soon discover that Lloyd had experienced inexplicable loss of his own, and we felt a deep kinship with him and his story.

Together, over a period of two and a half years, we would craft an intimate and immersive portrait of a man with a rich inner life who is routinely overlooked and often feared. We worked with him in the way one might work with a non-actor in a neorealist film. It was like a dance – sometimes Lloyd would lead and we’d follow and sometimes it was the other way around. Our collaboration became a salve for us all – Lloyd’s gentle spirit kept us grounded in the midst of tremendous turmoil, and he, in turn, felt both embraced and seen.

Having lived off the grid his entire adult life, the shutdown wasn’t a considerable adjustment for Lloyd. He has always lived on his own terms, unencumbered by the daily rhythms that consume and threaten to swallow the rest of us. We knew it was risky making a feature with a sole protagonist with no fixed address or phone and who at any given moment could vanish into thin air, but Lloyd always showed up, displaying a deep and unwavering commitment to the making of this film. We offer A Man Imagined as a testament to survival.