HOW I SEE

Drawn into the Tenderloin through the street-level cinema of his mentor Rob Nilsson, Zhan Petrov walked its blocks and alleys with a camera to listen to people surviving on the margins of one of the wealthiest cities on earth. Interweaving street encounters with reflections alongside Bay Area filmmakers Rob Nilsson and Robert Zagone and Ukrainian war filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, HOW I SEE holds two landscapes of ruin in a single frame: the sudden destruction of Russian bombardment in Ukraine, and the slow attrition of systemic neglect, displacement, and indifference in San Francisco.

The film’s form was forged directly by the realities of making it. During the first night of shooting, Petrov and his crew were attacked on the street and their camera equipment was smashed—yet technicians managed to salvage every frame of footage from the damaged phones. Refusing either to abandon the work or to film from a tourist’s safe remove, Petrov returned to those same blocks alongside a local guide who knew the neighborhood from within, finishing the film at eye level.

Born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1992 and named by his father after French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, Zhan Petrov graduated from the Ukrainian National Marine Academy and served at sea as a second officer on international merchant vessels before coming to the United States away from the war in Ukraine.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Petrov works across documentary and experimental cinema as a close collaborator of Caméra d’Or and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Rob Nilsson within Nilsson’s improvisational Direct Action method. His films include the single-take four-screen feature Love Funeral (2021) and the feature documentary The Way Things Seem to Be, a portrait of Nilsson’s life and work.