The Island of Pete: Documentry Short

Every artist lives between two fears.

Services

Documentary Film,  Director

Role

Director. Co-editor. Producer. No client, no brief, no budget beyond what I could put together myself. Just an artist in Gowanus and the discipline to finish.

Impact

Selected by five documentary festivals across the Northeast. Programmers who see hundreds of submissions chose this one for a screen.

Overview

Pete Raho has a wall in his Gowanus apartment holding 1,200 CDs. Each one stamped with a ticket gun on the date he last listened to it. That's the first thing you notice when you walk in. The second thing you notice is that Pete has built an entire life this way — woodworker, engineer, teacher, music historian, self-proclaimed steward of the plants. A world ordered by systems only he understands.

He's been chasing a sustainable life as an artist for years. What he has to show for it is a small apartment filled to the brim with his own creations, and an optimism that shouldn't survive the circumstances but does. The film started as a portrait of an over-ambitious dreamer. It became a story about failing on your own terms and choosing that risk over the safer one.

Insight

Every artist lives between two fears. The risk of failing on your own terms. And the greater risk of never trying at all.

The story

The film wasn't going to work as a portrait of ambition alone. Ambition is a common story. What made Pete different was the contradiction — the wall of stamped CDs next to the small apartment, the defiant optimism next to the precarious circumstances, the island he'd built for himself that he sometimes wanted to escape from. I wasn't trying to resolve the contradiction. I was trying to sit inside it long enough for the audience to feel it too.

Camera

Borrowed from the dreaminess and grit of 1970s American cinema. Long pauses. Silence. Time. The camera doesn't rush Pete — it waits for him, catches up to his energy, then settles when he does. Cinematographer Matt Fuentes and I storyboarded to make the environments characters. Two locations doing opposite work — Pete's apartment claustrophobic and dense, his studio textural and open. The contrast gave the film a fishbowl-like depth. You couldn't understand him without seeing both.

Why this film

The challenge of making art while being exposed to the harsh realities of the world is a bittersweet struggle. The feeling of being closed off from intimacy is something I relate to. Pete's built himself an island he sometimes wants to escape from and is sometimes quite content on. That contradiction is the film. It's also the reason I keep making things when nobody's asking me to.

Credits

DUANE BRUTON        © 2026
Did I mention you have nice hair

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