Palermo: The Night Pendulum Control Took Flight.

Something special to put in my shopping bag.

My touchdown in Palermo felt like a symbolic crossing — not just of continents, but of intent. It marked a new arc in my Escape Artist journey.

As a photographer and now filmmaker, someone who has spent a lifetime moving through the world with deliberate restlessness, the arrival felt fitting. I had come to Sicily for the Paladino d’Oro Sports Film Festival, where my film Pendulum Control — centred on disabled athlete Ajmal Samuel — would stand as a bridge between my documentary instincts and his philosophy of resilience, performance, and human possibility.

I could talk endlessly about my love for the still image, about the quiet act of looking and the private revelations a single frame can contain. And yet it is film — that beautiful medium of motion — that has carried me forward.

That is why I am here, on the road, with my tent and my camera, testing my resolve in the European winter. There are multiple agendas ahead, some practical, others personal. But the larger purpose will reveal itself as this essay unfolds.

Camp Sferracavallo

And this journey began quietly, seated aboard a Turkish Airlines A350-900, watching the world beneath me?

From Johannesburg to Istanbul I was gifted a 'my flight route' aerial atlas: the yawning scar of Africa’s Great Rift, the ancient geometry of Alexandria, the glinting thread of the Bosphorus. Subsonic, yet transcendent — flying not only over geography, but through history and time itself. With every passing mile, anticipation built toward the moment of arrival.

Italy...

Few places stir the imagination quite like Sicily — a crossroads of history, culture, and conquest. An island shaped by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, and countless others who left their signatures in stone and story.

My first impressions did not disappoint. Pastel peach and terracotta villas washed in soft winter light. The limestone massif of Monte Gallo rising above the fishing enclave of Sferracavallo — abrupt, timeless, a sentinel watching the centuries turn. Looking at it, I couldn’t help thinking of Roman legions, Punic warriors, and the moment Sicily became Rome’s first province beyond the Italian peninsula.

And so here I stand, at the threshold of a place steeped in ancient history. A place that mirrors the internal arc of the Escape Artist: curiosity, motion, transformation.

How could one not get lost in imagination in a landscape so deeply inscribed with the past — and yet so open to what comes next?

Why this journey matters now...

Life hands us pacts as easily as it hands us passports — promises we make to ourselves and to others. I have made one such pact: to keep moving, and to keep creating. Movement here is not mere motion; it’s a discipline. It is continuity rendered as intent.

There are reasons to take that discipline seriously. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour idea tells us practice matters; it’s not the whole story, but it points to an essential truth — skill needs time. I have invested those hours in the craft that picked me: first photography, now film.

Practice gave me technique. Habit gave me courage. But practice without articulation is an inward exercise; the work only becomes culture when it is shown and translated into words and form.

This is where writing comes in...

Writers like Dan Koe remind us that showing up — daily, consistently, with the hard work of shaping thought into language — turns solitary practice into public meaning.

You do the work so that the work can do its work on others.

I’m showing up in Palermo because this trip is literal and symbolic: a body in motion and a mind in transition. It is for my work, yes, but it is also for Ajmal. Our pact is mutual. He wants his story to embolden others with disability. I want my films and photographs to make his message visible. Neither of us is “selling” triumph; we are making the case that perseverance, properly channeled, creates possibility.

This is not a sponsored vanity trip. It is a creative covenant between two people committed to discipline, craft, and public witness. Great work rarely arrives as accident. It arrives where time, attention, and conscience meet.

Pendulum Control and its path here...

My film Pendulum Control exists because two distinct ambitions intersected at just the right moment. Ajmal Samuel—paraplegic athlete, relentless experimenter—wanted his attempt to become one of the world’s few licensed adaptive paraglider pilots recorded in a way that didn’t dilute the grit or the uncertainty of that pursuit.

A written profile or a set of still photographs wouldn’t have captured the physics, the doubt, the sensory immersion of watching his modified chair leave the earth. He needed motion.

And truthfully, I needed it too.
 Not just a project, but a test.

After decades as a photographer—someone trained to freeze a moment, isolate a truth, and move on—I felt an itch for something more demanding. Filmmaking forces you to commit: to time, to unfolding events, to the unscripted nature of human effort.

It’s a medium that doesn’t let you sit comfortably behind instinct or habit.

Taking on Ajmal’s story meant stepping out from a career spent illustrating other people’s narratives. Usually, a journalist’s words arrived first; my task was to interpret. Or I’d receive the open-ended brief—“go find a story in Saigon”—and rely on intuition to guide me.

But with Ajmal, there was no script.
 The story didn’t exist yet.
 It had to be lived before it could be told.

Ajmal and Matthew van Zyl, his adaptive paragliding coach, became the narrative engine.

My job was simply to stay attentive enough—physically, emotionally, technically—to capture the moments where struggle turned to insight, where human limitation bent but didn’t break.

If the film now stands in a festival selection, it’s not because I set out to make something triumphant. It’s because I allowed myself to follow two people pushing at the edges of what’s possible—and in doing so, pushed at my own.

In that sense, Pendulum Control isn’t just a film.


It’s the culmination of years spent training myself to see, now expanded into a medium that demands I also listen, anticipate, and evolve. It justifies the risk of stepping into motion after a lifetime of stillness.

Under the banner of The Escape Artist, I coined the term Slow Witness and gave it its own corner on my website—a home for my ongoing fascination with documentary film making and photo-reportage.

The Slow Witness manifesto is simple: a fidelity to the real; the practice of bearing witness to who we are, how we live, what we do, and how we endure.

But I’ve always carried a second curiosity, one that sits beside realism: ambiguity.

People reveal more in what they omit than in what they declare. Identities are slippery.

Motives shift. Reality itself can feel porous. And escapism, in the broadest sense, is simply the permission we give ourselves to drift into the imaginary. That’s why fiction holds such gravitational pull.

Sometimes unreality is more revealing than the real. Our dreams prove that nightly.

So I commit to another mode of storytelling—one built for ambiguity—and for this I choose photography, specifically street photography. A still image, by virtue of its silence, invites projection.

Meaning gathers in the gaps. Out of this practice another concept has emerged: Documentary Dreamworks.

Documentary Dreamworks...

Cinematic, poetic photography that blurs the line between make-believe and reality.

This is my cinematic playground, where truth softens into fiction and photography does the narrative lifting.

These aren’t traditional documentaries, nor fictions masquerading as fact. They are dream-traces—drawn from real streets, real light, and imagined histories.

Each vignette begins with a rumour: a city of spies, Macau’s slot-machine underworld, a vanished coastline. Some exist. Some don’t. All leave a residue.

This is my personal genre: slow cinema for the wandering soul.

Which brings me back to Palermo. I refuse to see Sicily through the prism of picture-postcard reality.

The Cosa Nostra, whether we like it or not, hangs like atmospheric pressure over the island’s mythology, so just for the fun of it—in the days leading up to the Paladino D’Oro festival—I’ve been walking the streets with my cameras, viewing the city through a loose Godfather lens.

Not literally. Creatively.

As a spark. As a device.

The Alleged Territories, the working title for this series, lets me play with innuendo: what’s seen and what’s suggested, what’s documented and what’s imagined. Sicily becomes a metaphor for in-between-ness—old vs. new, legality vs. legend, surface reality vs. history. And why not? Creativity is a muscle; ambiguity is resistance training.

So in the lead-up to Paladino, I’m out on the streets of Palermo, wandering through my own quiet Carleone-esque hall of mirrors—fiction brushing against reality, each one illuminating the other. Because photography and film are all-consuming arts.

And only those willing to stay curious, stay perceptive, and stay in motion will ever get close to doing them justice.

Series: The Alleged Territories. Title: The Italian Job.

Series: The Alleged Territories. Title: Bella Donna

Now back to Slow Witness and the Palandino D’Oro Sports Film Festival...

So here in Palermo, moving through the festival crowds alone, I’m aware of the quiet presence of my collaborator, Ajmal Samuel. Not in a dramatic or emotional way — simply as a set of questions I’ve absorbed over time, a way of looking that now travels with me.

The 19th-century Teatro Politeama Garibaldi, located in Piazza Ruggero, served as the grand venue for the acclaimed Paladino d’Oro Sports Film Festival.

Working with him has always been less about motivation and more about method: attention, discipline, follow-through.

He approaches his sport and I approach my craft from different angles, but the demands are similar — precision, patience, and the willingness to stay inside a challenge long after the novelty fades.

That common ground is what keeps our partnership alive, not any notion of mentor or muse.

I'd watched these two films earlier that Sunday morning at Cinema De Seta, knowing the awards would be announced that evening. Both were outstanding, and I felt they had strong chances of taking home trophies. Sure enough, that night Nordend won for Best Cinematography — a well-deserved honour. Afterward, I had the chance to speak with the film’s central figure, the celebrated pilot and snowboarder Géraldine Fasnacht. I congratulated her on an exceptional film and her standing as one of the great extreme athletes of our time. Honestly, I fully expected Nordend to also win Best Extreme Sport Film. Little did I know the cosmos had a rather unexpected surprise lined up for me instead.

So as I navigate this festival, assessing films, listening to panels, watching how stories are constructed, I often find myself thinking:
 Would this hold up under scrutiny? Would this align with the standards we’ve set for each other?


Those questions sharpen my eye without dictating what I see.

In a way, this trip continues a conversation we’ve been having for years — about resilience, about the architecture of personal ambition, about how narratives can move people when they are shaped honestly.

His perspective has never been something I emulate; it’s something that runs parallel to mine, reminding me that craft and conviction aren’t separate pursuits. And while he’s thousands of kilometres away, preparing for his next challenge, the echo of his approach — pragmatic, deliberate, forward-leaning — sits quietly in the background of my own.

Not as inspiration in the glossy, poster-worthy sense, but as a reminder of the pact we made: to document what matters, and to keep pushing the boundary of what we’re capable of creating.

That is the real collaboration:
 two lives, two disciplines, intersecting at the point where effort becomes expression. And that, more than anything, is what I’ve carried with me into Palermo.

The Paladino d’Oro Sports Film Festival Awards...

Posters we're up all over town.

A Night before the Opera.

The Paladino d’Oro does not ease into its presence — it arrives with unapologetic Italian flourish. The organisers understand spectacle the way Italians understand coffee: instinctively, almost genetically. Everything had a certain inevitability to it — as if this was the only way such an event could ever manifest on Sicilian soil.

The pre-awards gathering began on Saturday night, a kind of prelude masquerading as a party. They moved us across town by coach, depositing us at the Palermo Country Club — a venue so polished it felt designed for precisely this intersection of cinema and ceremony.

Music drifted through the space, a DJ threading the night together, and long tables offered the kind of abundance only Italy seems capable of: salami with the right amount of bite, bowls of olives glistening under soft lights, cheeses that needed no introduction, crisp breads, delicate finger food, and a steady flow of wine and champagne.

Party night at the Palermo Country Club, Saturday 6th December 2025.

It was a room full of technicians of the moving image — directors, editors, cinematographers, producers — each with their own obsessions, their own scars, their own hard-earned instincts.

The conversations were lively, the handshakes firm, the subtext always present: Here we all are. We made something, and now the world is watching.

And then Sunday arrived...

Teatro Politeama Garibaldi

Crowd Control

The awards ceremony was held at the Teatro Politeama Garibaldi, built in the late 19th century, its neoclassical curves still carrying the confidence of an era that believed deeply in grandeur. As we approached, I saw crowds pressed along the fence line, craning for a glimpse of the parade of filmmakers.

It had the unmistakable scent of a premiere — a kind of condensed, electric anticipation — and it struck me, almost humorously, that this was probably as close to the Oscars as I was ever likely to wander.

Flashing a VIP badge has its privileges, and I moved past the waiting crowds and into the flow of evening wear: sharp tuxedos, impeccably cut black suits, women in gowns that sparkled like the night sky. The air felt charged — not with arrogance, but with collective expectation.

These were people who had spent years inside editing rooms, behind lenses, on late-night shoots and cold mountain ridges, and tonight they were being seen.

The Italians, of course, do ceremony the way they do everything else: with style, theatricality, and a pinch of chaos that somehow makes it perfect. This was, after all, the world’s oldest sports film festival — and they intended to make the night unforgettable.

Beyond the red carpet, past the tables laid with food and prosecco, ushers guided us into the theatre. High ceilings, gilded ornamentation, velvet seats — it was all there, as if awaiting its cue. We took our places, the lights dimmed with operatic timing, and the room settled into that rare silence where anything feels possible.

The show was about to begin...

So what’s that old saying… the best things in life arrive when you least expect them? Well, what I’m about to share is exactly that — a monumental surprise.

This is where I gate-crashed the event — and where an unexpected, monumental surprise landed on me toward the end. It’s all here in this rather hastily edited walk-through

Sitting in the audience, I filmed each category as it appeared on the giant screens: best director, best screenplay, best documentary.

One by one, they passed with no mention of Pendulum Control, and I began lowering my phone, accepting that tonight wasn’t our night.

Then came best cinematography. Nordland took the award — beautifully shot and fully deserving. Still no sign of Pendulum Control. At this point, I was mentally winding down.

And then the next category appeared: Extreme Sports.

Nominee after nominee rolled by. Strong films, tough competition. Then, right at the very end of the list… there it was: Pendulum Control.

And then…the winner is.........

— PENDULUM CONTROL.

For a moment, I simply froze.

Then I stood, walked to the stage through a blaze of lights and lenses, with six hundred people watching. Cameras followed me as I accepted the trophy and delivered my speech — which you’ll be able to hear when RAI broadcasts the ceremony on the 15th.

For now, I have only a single video and a photo to share. But what a night. Truly one of the most extraordinary moments of my life.

Oh what a night!

Long live Paladino. Long live Palermo.
Long live Italy.

And finally, my thanks — not as a formality, but as recognition of the people without whom this film could not exist:

• Ajmal Samuel — subject and executive producer, for placing his trust in me from day one.


• Dhanada Mishra — dear friend, and the person who first connected me to Ajmal.


• Matthew van Zyl — adaptive paragliding coach, whose skill and calm precision shaped both the journey and the film.


• Ron McMillan — for turning my 250-page paper edit into a refined, resonant voiceover script.


• Willem Coetzee — for a powerful first round of editing.


• Irion De Ronin — for sound design that elevated every chapter into something immersive.


• Selwyn Storer — for superb editing and motion-graphics work.

What a team.


What a film.


What a joy.

And now I have a sentry to guard Camp Sferracavallo :-)

All that glitters is gold.