Brace for Oblivion: Creative Leadership in Action

There is a particular kind of leadership that does not announce itself with authority, but rather arrives quietly, almost reverently, in the presence of other people’s truths. It does not rush to shape a narrative but instead lingers long enough to be shaped by it. When filmmaker and producer Xackery Irving joined the Creative Leadership Community Session to share his experiences of bringing a story from idea to vision to theatres, what emerged was not just a conversation about film, but an invitation into a deeper way of leading creatively with humility, courage, and trust.

Xackery Irving is a New York–based filmmaker drawn to stories that unfold at the edge of crisis, where human resilience, disorientation, and identity intersect. His debut feature documentary, AMERICAN CHAIN GANG, explored controversial forced labor prison programs in the U.S. His follow-up film, NOTHING WITHOUT YOU, is a psychological thriller examining memory, loss, and obsession. Xackery currently serves as Co-Chair of the Producers Guild of America’s Employment Committee.

Throughout his career, Xackery has elevated the voices of marginalized populations, profiling the humanity and shared recognition of life’s tumultuous moments. What is unique about his approach is that he does not extract stories, he enters into relationship with the people he films. In that relationship, something more honest, more human, begins to take form.

In his most recent project Brace for Oblivion Xackery traveled to the front lines of the war in Ukraine where he filmed alongside civilian soldiers. These are teachers, mechanics, and artists who, months prior, had never held a weapon, but now serve in defending their land, their people, and their culture. These were ordinary lives interrupted by extraordinary circumstances. Instead of positioning himself as the storyteller capturing their experience, he reframed the entire endeavor. “This is our film,” he would say. It’s a subtle shift in language, but a profound shift in power. In the framing of “our,” there is agency. There is trust. There is an acknowledgment that the people living the story are not subjects to be documented, but rather collaborators in its telling. He did not impose his creative will onto their reality. He created space for them to interpret, to express, to guide what the world would ultimately see.

Xackery spoke about stepping into environments that are clearly uncomfortable. When most of us would flee, Xackery steps forward with curiosity and courage. He steps into spaces and places that are not just physically but spiritually disorienting. Places where certainty dissolves. Where the familiar scaffolding of control is no longer available. Rather than resisting that disorientation, Xackery leans into it. He strips himself of comfort, not as an act of sacrifice, but as an act of alignment and what remains is instinct, presence, and an openness to what wants to emerge.

There is a quiet discipline in this approach. A willingness to trust the creative process even when it refuses to move in a straight line. Xackery reminded us, artists rarely move in a linear fashion from A to B. The path is rarely efficient, often unclear, and almost always chaotic. However, if we can learn to think big and to release our grip on how things should unfold, we begin to access a state of flow where the work starts to move through us, rather than from us.

In that flow, something reveals itself… Raw. Dynamic. Real. Unfiltered.

This is where purity lives. Not in the polished version, not in the tightly controlled narrative, but in the first emergence of truth before it is shaped into something more digestible. Xackery honors that moment. He does not rush to impose structure. He allows the story to breathe, to be messy, to be incomplete. He understands that structure can always come later.

If you miss the truth in its most unguarded form, you cannot reconstruct it.

What makes his approach especially powerful is how deeply relational it is. This is creative leadership at its most human form. Relational. Rooted in trust. Willing to release control. It asks something of us that is not always easy… which is to listen more than we speak, to be silent long enough to hear what is being said beneath the surface and to recognize that our role is not always to direct, but sometimes to hold space for others to direct themselves.

There is courage in that restraint to choose not to dominate the narrative, but to allow the unknown to remain open just a little longer and trust that others carry within them the wisdom needed to tell their own stories. Perhaps that is where the deepest lesson lives. Creative leadership is not about control. It is about relationship. It is about co-creation. It is about trusting that when we loosen our grip, something more honest can take shape that could not have been engineered.

Xackery’s work reminds us that storytelling is not an act of ownership. It is an act of stewardship; to bear witness, to listen, to trust and when the moment asks for it, to step forward with courage and tell the essence of what is happening, not perfectly, but truthfully.

Thank you Xackery Irving for sharing your time and talents and exemplifying what it means to be a creative leader.

To experience Xackery’s work, watch the trailer for Brace for Oblivion and check out independent film fests near you for a showing. If you are touched by the storytelling shared in the trailer and have the means, we invite you to donate to United Help Ukraine.