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Serendipity and the Making of The Banjo Boys

February 3, 2026 0 Creativity, Filmmaking, The Banjo Boys

Pictured: Tim and I finally meeting in person in Andalucía, after six years of remote collaboration.

Documentary filmmaking often feels like an act of faith. You begin with a camera, an idea, and no guarantee that the pieces will come together. The Banjo Boys is a film shaped as much by chance encounters as by intention – a six-year journey built on serendipity, persistence, and resilience.

Where It All Began

The story starts on the streets of Lilongwe, where Yobu and Yosefe met. Despite the struggle around them, they managed to form a band, crafting instruments from found materials and honing their music through thousands of hours of performing. For street musicians, there are no rehearsals – only the act itself. Every performance is both the practice and the product. It’s not unlike the Beatles in Hamburg, where the gruelling schedule of playing night after night became their training ground, forging them into the band they would become.

Then came Neil. After meeting a random guy called Greg, who persuaded him to pack up and leave the UK, Neil followed his passion for music to Malawi. When these three met, something real began to take shape. The music had found its champion, and the catalyst that would propel the band beyond the borders of Malawi was activated.

The Film Takes Form

Years later, a singer-songwriter and a tech entrepreneur met at Liwonde National Park in Malawi. Neil and Tim Delhaes discussed the band and the possibility of turning their story into a film. That conversation became the scaffolding for what would eventually become a feature documentary.

After six years working together remotely, Tim and I finally met in person in Andalucía. It seemed better to just catch up rather than go into work mode. Whilst I’ve remained in Bournemouth throughout the collaboration, Tim is more like a rolling stone – his home has been Bali, Brazil, Uganda, Austria, Spain, and Chile over those six years.

Towards the end of last year, I was fortunate to meet three individuals who have shaped my career the most. Charles Werb, who normally lives in Dubai, was coincidentally in the UK and attended our world premiere at London Breeze Film Festival. Then I saw Rachel, from Rachel’s English, at the New York screening, who has been my biggest client to date. And finally, meeting Tim in person completed this sequence of meetings.

Professionalism vs. Mastery

I’ve been thinking a lot about Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art lately. In his section “We’re All Pros Already,” he outlines what defines us as professionals:

  • We show up every day
  • We show up no matter what
  • We stay on the job all day
  • We are committed over the long haul
  • The stakes for us are high and real

Craft may take years to master, but professionalism is something we can quickly and easily bring into our work.

The Rice Question

Our biggest battle as a team was about how to fit in the fourth protagonist – a mysterious figure called Rice, something like the fifth Beatle. Rice left the band for various reasons, only to end up in prison. It’s a dramatic story that weaves into the film alongside Yobu, Yosefe, and Neil’s journey, but deciding how much space to give it, and where, tested us more than anything else in the edit. In the end, the film found its shape.

The Lesson

If there’s anything The Banjo Boys has taught me, it’s that serendipity rewards preparation. You can’t always manufacture the right meeting at the right time, but you can show up, stay open, and be ready when it happens. The film exists because a street musician met another street musician, because a stranger convinced someone to leave home, because a singer-songwriter and a tech entrepreneur met at a national park and forged an unlikely friendship, and because me and my brother managed to work together again, over a decade after our band broke up.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is keep going, stay professional, and trust that the story will find its way.

The Banjo Boys is a feature documentary directed by Johan Nayar and produced by Neil Nayar and Tim Delhaes. It continues its festival run with upcoming screenings at Oxford International Film Festival and Seeyousound in Turin.

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Losing Yourself to Find Yourself

February 19, 2025 0 Creativity, Travel

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

When I first arrived in Goa as a 19-year-old, in the early hours of the morning, I was knackered from nearly 24 hours of non-stop travel via Heathrow and Mumbai. But I was also too thrilled to be there to even think about sleep. Before setting off, my path had seemed clear—I was supposed to return to the UK and study law. From my vantage point overlooking the beach, a vibrant scene of psychedelic trees and pulsating trance music unfolded, marking the start of a shift in my self-perception and worldview.

Among the crowd, I saw both sides of the coin of living free. Some, dressed in baggy hippie clothes, looked like they were experiencing life at its fullest—dancing, eyes alight with something raw and untamed, as if they had escaped a world that was still caged. Others had a faded blankness in their gaze, as if they had gone too far, to a place where the colour of life might never fully return. It was a stark contrast, and even then, I sensed that the fine line between freedom and escape was one worth paying attention to.

They say you go to India to find yourself. It’s a cliché for a reason. But maybe you have to lose yourself entirely before you have any hope of finding what lies underneath. Travel is not just about movement across land—it’s about the collapse of the familiar, the stripping away of assumptions, the realisation that the map of the world you’ve been carrying in your head is only a fraction of what’s really out there.

In NLP, there’s a concept that has stayed with me more than any other: Sensory Acuity. It’s the art of refining awareness, tuning into the details that others might overlook, and sharpening the ability to experience the world to its fullest. If creativity is the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated things, then Sensory Acuity is the key to unlocking that process. And nothing forces you to sharpen your senses quite like being dropped into an new environment.

Pacific islanders once navigated vast oceans by feeling the rhythms of the waves beneath them, sensing shifts in wind patterns, and reading the stars with an attunement so precise that a single miscalculation could mean death. For an artist, death takes another form: reputational damage. To be misunderstood, dismissed, or torn apart by critics can be traumatic—perhaps one reason so many artists lean on drugs to alleviate the pressure. If your livelihood and sense of self are wrapped up in your work, then failure is not just professional—it’s deeply personal.

But what if creativity itself is not something to be manufactured, but something already within us? Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, suggests that in certain psychedelic states of mind, we are not seeing a distorted version of reality—we are seeing things as they truly are. He draws on an evolutionary idea: that the mind functions like a reducing valve, filtering out the overwhelming infinity of existence so that we can focus on survival. But in moments of expanded consciousness—whether through psychedelics, deep meditation, or creative flow—the blinkers are pulled back, revealing something much greater.

Perhaps this is what travel does too. It forces the reducing valve open. It dismantles the mental filters that have kept your world small. India didn’t hand me some grand revelation about who I was; it simply dissolved the framework of who I thought I was. I had been certain of my direction before—law school, a predictable career, a well-mapped future. But certainty is an illusion. And if you want to find yourself, maybe the first step is to let go of the version of yourself you thought you needed to be.

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