THE STORY BEHIND THE FILM

I was a teenager when I met Barry.

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He let me into his workshop, put a piece of steel in my hands, and showed me how to make a knife. I don't know if he'd even remember it. But I do. I remember the heat of it, and I remember that he took it seriously that I was there at all.

Twenty years later I went back with a camera.

I thought I was making a film about craftsmanship. But sitting in that small shed watching him work, I realised I was watching a man who still hasn't finished. He's made blades for kings. He built something so big it nearly consumed him, then walked away from it to make the same simple knives that first drew him in thirty years ago. And he told me, without any drama, that he hasn't made his best knife yet.

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That stayed with me. Not the fire, not the steel — the fact that a man can give his whole life to something and still be reaching for it.

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I wanted the film to move at his pace. No narration, no explanations. Just a man, a passion, and the work he isn't done with.

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— Isaak Schiller