DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I began filming my father, Charlie Grinker, in 2017, when, at 84, he found himself starting over in a small town in central Florida. A writer and creator through and through, he retreated to a tiny office, shaping six decades of work into a one-man show, turning everything he had experienced into something to share. He lived vicariously through his past while others lived vicariously through his life.

When I began editing in 2025, one story rose above the rest: Charlie’s lifelong fascination with Robert Goddard — a scientist ridiculed in his lifetime, vindicated after it, and still largely unknown. My father, now 93, is determined to change that. The timing felt urgent: a new space race, a century since Goddard’s first rocket launch, and fifty years since the first lander touched down on Mars.

When my father tells a story, he doesn’t recount it; he relives it. Watching him, I kept thinking of Walter Mitty, or Ray Bradbury: a man slipping the bounds of his small room into the worlds he carries. Animation became the film’s way of going with him — into Goddard’s cherry tree, into the futures both men imagined.

Goddard ran out of time but never gave up. My father refuses to stop. What they share is what I want this film to hold: how imagination and spirit can keep a life rich to the very end.