"A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure." - Roxana Hadadi, RogerEbert.com

"Yogi creates a cinema that is simultaneously meticulously physical and wildly metaphysical, offering passionate dramatic correlates and symbols for the unrepresentable-for the subjective experience of death." - Richard Brody, New Yorker

I WAS A SIMPLE MAN is a ghost story set in the pastoral countryside of the north shore of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. Revealed in four chapters, it tells the story of an elderly man facing the end of his life, visited by the ghosts of his past. Incorporating familial history and mythology, dream logic and surrealism, I Was a Simple Man is a time-shifting, kaleidoscopic story of a fractured family facing the death of their patriarch that will take us from the high-rises of contemporary Honolulu to pre-WWII pastorals of O‘ahu and, finally, into the beyond. (Strand Releasing)


Awards & Nominations
Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
Official Selection - Sundance Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival, São Paulo International Film Festival


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