My main feature documentary focus for 2026 is completing the edit for 'Homeless Dave', a 2-hour film about a homeless writer and street performer named David Farrell. I first met Dave in 2016 when a friend gave me his business card, which read 'Homeless Dave, Urban Camper & Affluent Bum'. Dave and I went for a coffee, he told me his story and a week later we started filming.
homeless dave.
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The Story
After living alone on the streets of Windsor for twelve years, Dave meets Duncan, a musician who was also experiencing homelessness at the time, and together they emerge from the alleyways to form a busking band. They quickly capture the attention of Chapel Street with their fantastical renaissance of the homeless image, and endeavour to take their act from the streets to the stage. Not long before their big show, Duncan finds housing refuge and Dave is alone again.
Dave reaches a crisis point and decides that he can no longer endure life on the streets. The documentary then follows Dave as he grapples with the challenge of finding his way into safe housing. Along the journey, he shares the past events and his own behaviours that lead him to living on the streets in the first place, including divorcing his wife and nuking his once promising screen writing career.
Homeless Dave is an in-depth character profile and exploration of a man's life, attempting to understand what led him to homelessness. Dave once worked with industry power houses - he was considered uniquely creative by his peers. Through Dave, we meet a range of characters and experience the humanity behind the rapidly growing numbers of homeless people – we learn that anybody can end up living on the streets.
The 10 Year Journey
When I first met Dave, he was in the prime of his homelessness (his words, not mine). But that was brief, and sandwiched in between long periods of chaos. At the time, he was sharp, articulate and ambitious. He carried himself like someone who lived on a truer plane of reality, compared with the regular people who walked by. Dave had been a professional writer. A screenwriter. An author. A man with industry credits and literary ambition… and he was eager to reclaim his esteem.
For nearly two years, I filmed Dave’s life as it unfolded, several times a month. There was no crew, schedule or funding body. Just me and my new camera… and access. I filmed him in parks, on footpaths, in hidden makeshift accommodations, in the spaces between breakdowns and moments of objective clarity and self awareness. Sometimes he was magnetic and lucid. Sometimes he was unraveling. It was messy and deeply personal, as the more time we spent together, the more we blurred the lines of filmmaking and became friends. Over those years, a body of work accumulated… not just footage of homelessness, but of a mind at war with itself.
Dave and I eventually had a big falling out. I moved to the Philippines to explore the world and immerse myself in a different way of life… but Dave believed that I’d run away with the footage. We didn’t speak for a long while, and I threw the footage into the back drawer and the back of my mind. The project became dormant. Not because the story was finished, but because it was too raw and unresolved. After some time, I understood it differently… as Dave’s abandonment issues resurfacing, and my own actions echoing people from his past who had burned him and left him.
When I returned to Australia years later, I began searching for Dave. But he wasn’t in his usual spots. I called around and eventually somebody close to Dave told me that he had died. It felt abrupt and incomplete. There was no closure. Just the strange grief that comes when someone chaotic and brilliant vanishes without ceremony. For a while, I believed the story had ended off screen. Then, miraculously… I discovered he was alive. The report had been wrong. My mate Filip walked past Dave, called me and put Dave on the phone - he'd escaped the care facility that had been housing him for several years and decided to take a trip to his favourite old bench on Chapel Street. That twist, the false death, the reappearance and the great escape felt like something Dave himself would have written.
These days, I visit Dave in the care facility whenever I return to Melbourne. He’s older, frailer, and cant seem to retain new memories. His voice is slower, raspy and weighted by age, alcoholism and medication. But the core of him is still there. The intellect flickering behind the eyes. And he’s safe, finally with a permanent roof over his head. Sitting with him again after years apart reframed the entire project. This is no longer just a film about homelessness. It’s a film about a mind - about brilliance, collapse, ego, addiction, faith, self-destruction and survival.
I’m now halfway through the 'assembly draft', which currently sits at five hours. When this part of the process is complete, it will be about ten hours long - a full excavation and compilation of the best material captured between 2016 and 2025. This stage isn't about polish, It’s about preservation (nothing good is cut out at assembly and every relevant thread is laid out before reduction begins). Once the ten-hour assembly is complete, I’ll then spend several months sculpting it down to a two-hour feature.
That process will involve:
- Structural refinement & narrative distillation
- An original score by Hollywood Folk Hogan
- Animations illuminating Dave's writing & memories
- Completed sound design and colourgrade
The goal is to complete the final film by the end of 2026, and to achieve that I’ll be spending four months in the Philippines (July - October) to work on it full time. Homeless Dave has never been a quick project. It's followed the rhythm of Dave’s life (volatile, interrupted, nonlinear) and my own (unplanned, fly by the seat of the pants, watch to see what happens). What began as a camera pointed at a homeless man in 2016 has become a decade-long meditation on talent, mental illness, relationships and the thin line between genius and collapse. The film is no longer just about documenting a life but understanding the inner workings of a mind.