Paul produced, directed and edited Power Trip, a feature film about corruption assassination and street-rioting over electricity in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia: 

“After Piers Lewis (star of Power Trip) and I graduated from the University of Michigan, we hit the road together - lived and worked in Paris, explored Europe, and then made our way across Asia, where I got my first video editing job in Hong Kong. Piers and I continued to meet up in exotic locales over the next couple decades. 

He eventually wound up in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. He encouraged me to visit Georgia, and enticed me with a road trip across Turkey to get there (leaving me at the border because of the lack of a visa he told me I didn’t need, resulting in my getting robbed by a policeman in the bandit town of Batumi on the way to Tbilisi. But that’s another story…). 

During my visit to Tbilisi, I realized that Piers had an ulterior motive - he wanted me to make a movie about the work he was doing with the massive U.S. power corporation AES. Piers was spearheading the effort to restore Tbilisi’s electricity system, which was collapsing from corruption after independence from the Soviet Union. 

I told him he was out of his mind. Forget it. Basically that would require capturing the monumental transition from Communism to Capitalism in the wake of Soviet collapse. Way too big and unwieldy for a movie. 

But Piers wouldn’t let it go and got me in touch with a local news producer. Valeri Odikadze (eventually co-producer of Power Trip) started shooting and sending me scenes and imagery that couldn’t be ignored. I was enticed back to Tbilisi, where Piers gave me incredible access to characters and events as they were happening. 

So I started editing the material together. The result was undeniably compelling, and clearly important. Piers was still crazy, of course, but maybe he was also right - there was a great movie happening in Tbilisi. Slowly, I got sucked in to telling that monumental story….”