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Director / Editor / Designer
Burned out and adrift, a young man escapes New York and retreats to his father's abandoned childhood home. He finds strength in an underground movement that changes the course of his life.
Director's Statement:
Find Yourself began as a film about my friend, Danny, who walked away from the high-pressure grind of NYC and into the unknown, landing in his father's small hometown on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia just before the world shut down. He didn't know what he was looking for, only that he couldn't stay where he was.
Structured around the Wim Hof Method — breath, cold, and mindset — this film became a meditation on stillness, discomfort, and transformation. But it also became something else. While filming Find Yourself, I discovered that I was on my own parallel journey.
Director & Editor: Seth Deter
Cinematography: Luka Križanac
Assistant Camera: David Ramer, Marko Strilic. Seth Deter
Production House: 4-Alarm Film
Title Designer: Trey Tyler
Motion Designers: Travis Blake & Seth Deter
Music: Alon Peretz & Spearfisher
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I made Find Yourself during a period of my life when I felt disconnected from what home was and where I came from.
I lived with my biological parents until I was three years old before entering foster care and never saw them again. As a result, much of my life was shaped by unanswered questions about my family history and identity. While I knew pieces of my story, many parts remained unknown.
The project began through the reconnection of a college era friendship with Danny whose connection to Croatia and the Wim Hof community introduced me to a world that had profoundly impacted his own life. What started as an opportunity to document a unique community built around resilience and self-discovery gradually evolved into something much more personal.
I was fascinated by the idea that people willingly step into discomfort in order to discover something about themselves. Throughout the film, we meet individuals who use the ice as a tool to confront fear, grief, self-doubt, and uncertainty.
As filming progressed, I began to realize that I was undertaking a similar journey of my own.
Just before filming, I felt a calling and I went to the island of Vis in Croatia where I had learned I have some distant blood cousins. There, I came across a ruined stone house that was uninhabited since my family fled during WW2. Most notably, I learned my grandfather—a man I had never met—often wondered whether he had a grandson. At the same time, I was asking myself whether I truly had a family waiting for me there. That question stayed with me long after production ended and eventually led me to seek him out.
Looking back, meeting my grandfather was my own ice bath.
The film explores people who enter freezing water and discover that growth often exists on the other side of discomfort. For me, that discomfort was knocking on the door of a man I had never met and introducing myself as his grandson. Yet I also came to understand that I was stepping into his discomfort as well. We were both confronting decades of unanswered questions, uncertainty, and vulnerability.
The greatest gift this film gave me was not what it captured on camera. It was the relationship it created off camera. In the final years of his life, my grandfather and I built a connection that otherwise may never have existed. Through that relationship, I discovered not only a family, but a homeland, a history, and a deeper understanding of myself.
Find Yourself is ultimately a film about the courage to confront the things we would rather avoid. Sometimes that means stepping into the ice. Sometimes it means knocking on a stranger’s door and hoping to find family on the other side. In either case, transformation begins the moment we stop running from discomfort and move toward it.
