Some films are almost impossible to describe without somehow dismantling them. The Singers from Sam Davis is one of those. The first time I watched it, I came away with an overwhelming urge to explain it to everyone—then no idea how to do it. How do you convey a bar full of gruff, weathered men finding unexpected communion, bonding and exposing raw vulnerability through an impromptu sing-off, without either overselling the sentiment or underselling the absolute joy of what is about to unfold? What the Oscar-winning Davis, no stranger to the pages of DN, has pulled off, serving simultaneously as director, cinematographer, and editorial consciousness in real time, is a film whose formal architecture is inseparable from its soul. The visual grammar is deliberate: tight, isolating singles in the early going, the frame itself as lonely as the men it contains, before the compositions gradually expand as the room begins to breathe together. There’s only one handheld shot in the entire film, and Davis didn’t plan it—he simply grabbed the camera mid-performance, because the voice at the piano demanded it. That instinct, to surrender control at precisely the right moment, is what The Singers is fundamentally about.
Its cast arrived not through auditions but through under-discovered TikToks, subway stations, Bourbon Street corners—people who had been quietly, patiently extraordinary without an audience. Davis shot them on 35mm, recorded them live on location, and gave them no script, running 30-minute takes while never once calling cut. In our continued celebration of this year’s Oscar nominated shorts and just as the full film lands on Netflix, we spoke with him about how you build a film out of chaos, why the only way to capture these particular men was to never let them know the camera was rolling and why Big Mouth Billy Bass holds a very significant role in this chorus of extraordinary voices.
Each of those guys represented an explosion of source material that we were introducing into the pot—I called it chaos soup.
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