By: Elowen Gray
When Candace Singh set out to cast her debut short film, “Once a Man, Twice a Child,” she followed the standard playbook first. She searched widely, worked with casting directors, and ran her own casting calls looking for actors who could carry a story about a Caribbean father and first gen American daughter navigating a doctor’s appointment together. None of them could do it. The chemistry she needed wasn’t something a casting call could produce. It had to already exist.
So Singh cast her actual father and herself. But she didn’t stop there; to fully realize her vision she also cast her uncle to complete the family affair.
A Search That Kept Coming Up Short
“Once a Man, Twice a Child” centers on a young adult accompanying an aging parent to a medical appointment, a scene built from Singh’s own experience advocating for her father in doctor’s offices. The film also required two men who could believably read as brothers, carrying decades of shared history in every glance and unspoken cue. Professional actors, however skilled, would need to invent that history from scratch.
Singh auditioned widely before concluding that no combination of trained performers could replicate the specific, lived-in rhythm she was after. The relationships at the center of her film weren’t performances that could be directed into existence in a few weeks of rehearsal. There was something inimitable her own father and uncle already carried between them, a dynamic built over more than sixty years as brothers.
Building Comfort Before Building a Scene
Casting non-actors, let alone family members, in lead roles is a risk most filmmakers avoid. Singh took a different approach: she treated the casting decision as the beginning of a process, not the end of one.
For months leading up to the shoot, she ran informal improv sessions with her father and uncle, giving them space to interact naturally in front of a camera long before any actual filming began. Rather than handing them a script and asking them to perform it, she observed how they actually spoke to each other, the pauses, the teasing, the shorthand two brothers develop over a lifetime, and reshaped her scenes to fit those instincts instead of forcing her father and uncle to fit the scenes.
Singh also cast herself in the role of the daughter, a decision that served a practical purpose as much as a creative one. Having a familiar face across from her father on set helped keep him comfortable in an unfamiliar environment, allowing his performance to stay natural rather than guarded.
Directing Without Losing the Authenticity
The tradeoff with casting non-professional actors is control. Trained performers can hit a mark, repeat a take, and adjust a delivery on command. Family members with no acting background require a different kind of direction, one built on patience and observation rather than technical notes.
Singh’s process leaned into that difference instead of fighting it. By building scenes around her father and uncle’s actual idiosyncrasies rather than a fixed script, she preserved the very quality that made them right for the roles in the first place. The risk paid off: the finished film carries a texture that’s difficult to manufacture with professional casting, an unscripted authenticity that comes only from real relationships.
A Film That Doubles as a Family Record
Beyond its value as a technical case study in unconventional casting, “Once a Man, Twice a Child” carries a personal weight for Singh that a film with hired actors never could. What ended up on screen is, in her words, a living snapshot of her family’s dynamic in this moment in time, one she will carry with her regardless of where the film’s festival run takes it.
That dual purpose, a polished short film and an irreplaceable family document, is part of what makes the project distinct. Singh didn’t set out to make a film about her father and uncle. She set out to tell a broader story about the young adults quietly caring for aging parents, and in the process of finding the right people to tell it, ended up capturing something no one could have written into a script even if they tried.
What Other Filmmakers Can Take From It
Singh’s casting decision offers an instructive counterpoint to the conventional wisdom that a project needs recognizable names to gain traction. For stories built on intimate, specific relationships, the greater risk may be casting actors who have to simulate a connection rather than people who already have one.
It’s an approach that requires a filmmaker willing to give up a measure of control in exchange for authenticity, and the patience to build a production process around real people rather than the other way around. For Singh, whose entire mission with Emerald Tree Filmworks centers on giving an honest voice to underrepresented family dynamics, that tradeoff was never really a question.
Audiences can follow the making of “Once a Man, Twice a Child” and future Emerald Tree Filmworks projects on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where Singh continues to document the process behind her work.
