Influential Women Highlights Candace Singh: From Wall Street to the Director’s Chair

NY, UNITED STATES, August 25, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — From Goldman Sachs Vice President to Independent Filmmaker, Candace Singh Is Betting on the Stories Hollywood Has Overlooked

NEW YORK — Candace Singh spent more than a decade on Wall Street determining which companies were worth backing. Then she made the biggest bet of her career on herself.

The former Goldman Sachs Vice President is now a full-time filmmaker and founder of Emerald Tree Filmworks, a production company telling stories about family, culture, and modern adulthood—often using dark humor to metabolize life’s hardest truths.

Her journey from Wall Street to filmmaking may be unconventional. The decision was anything but sudden.

A Loss That Became a Calling

When Singh’s grandmother died during the COVID-19 pandemic, she was struck by how fragile the connection to ancestral and cultural history can be. Family stories and traditions often live within a shrinking circle of elders. When those voices disappear, pieces of that history can disappear with them.

Singh decided to do something about it. She began writing, producing, and directing stories rooted in her Guyanese heritage and family experiences she rarely saw represented on screen. That journey culminated in the debut of her professional short film Once a Man, Twice a Child.

For Singh, the film is more than a debut. It is the beginning of a larger conversation about who gets to define what adulthood, family, and independence look like on screen.

A Story Hollywood Rarely Tells

Once A Man, Twice A Child centers on a young adult accompanying an aging parent to a doctor’s appointment—a seemingly ordinary experience that Singh rarely saw reflected authentically in the entertainment she grew up watching.

Hollywood has long celebrated the young adult who leaves home, builds an independent life, and eventually starts a family of their own. Raised in Queens by parents who immigrated from Guyana, Singh grew up with a different understanding of adulthood. For her, staying close to family was not a failure to launch. Helping parents financially, accompanying them to medical appointments, and being present as they aged were expressions of love and responsibility.

Her perspective on the larger cultural gap deepened during more than a decade working with colleagues across Europe and Asia. She encountered professionals quietly balancing demanding careers with responsibilities to parents and extended family, many of whom felt their experiences were misunderstood through a predominantly Western lens.

In Singh’s words, “amidst Western society’s blaring call for individualism, these young adults are often relegated to feeling ‘othered’ because their collectivist family unit doesn’t fit neatly into Hollywood’s cookie-cutter picture of independent living.”

“My mission was to make the type of movie that I wanted to see, but could never find,” Singh says. “A movie that unflinchingly immersed the viewer in the role-reversal experience of a young adult looking after a parent.”

That perspective became central to both the film and Emerald Tree Filmworks: to portray family structures and responsibilities that are often treated as peripheral, while making audiences feel seen and entertained rather than lectured. Dark humor is her weapon of choice—a way to confront difficult subjects without stripping them of their humanity, absurdity, or joy.

She Broke the Casting Rules to Keep It Real

Singh initially approached casting conventionally. She searched extensively, worked with casting directors, and organized her own casting calls. But she couldn’t find professional actors who captured the cultural specificity and chemistry the story demanded. So, she stopped looking outside her family.

She cast her actual father and uncle as brothers. She also cast herself as the daughter opposite her father to help him feel comfortable in front of the camera.

Her father and uncle brought more than 60 years of shared history to the screen—something no audition could manufacture. For months before filming, Singh led improv sessions with them, observing their natural rhythms, humor, pauses, and idiosyncrasies before reshaping scenes around what she discovered.

The result was more than an unconventional casting decision. It captured a real family. The finished film became both a creative work and a living snapshot of Singh’s family at a moment in time that can never be recreated.

The Decision to Bet On Herself

Singh’s move into filmmaking was not a rejection of Wall Street. It was a decision to stop treating filmmaking as something she could build only in the margins.

She first left Goldman Sachs in 2021 to establish Emerald Tree Filmworks and immerse herself in the craft of writing, directing, and producing. But she eventually returned to corporate, joining JPMorgan, where she conducted due diligence on alternative investments.

While working full-time at JPMorgan, Singh wrote, directed, and produced Once a Man, Twice a Child, building the project around nights, weekends, holidays, and personal days. The experience proved she could make the film—but it also showed her the cost of trying to build two demanding careers simultaneously.

Eventually, Singh recognized that dividing her time between two careers, corporate and filmmaking was stalling the latter. The decision to leave finance carried real financial stakes. After her grandmother’s death, Singh assumed financial responsibility for retiring her parents early so they could enjoy their lives while still healthy and active.

But she also recognized another cost: time. As a young woman who hopes to marry and build a family of her own, Singh understood that continually postponing filmmaking could eventually mean sacrificing the very life she was trying to build. If she was going to prioritize her career over family-building, she decided the sacrifice would only be worth it if she went all in.

In March 2026, she left corporate for the second time to pursue filmmaking full-time. Within weeks, a friend asked her to help on a feature film set. The production wrapped in May.

What Wall Street Taught Her About Vision

Singh’s finance career didn’t disappear when she entered film. It became part of her advantage.

At Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, she learned to evaluate risk, recognize patterns, scrutinize opportunities, and make decisions when the outcome was uncertain. Her roles also gave her an unusually early view of companies and founders whose ideas (e.g., OpenAI and SpaceX) had the potential to reshape entire industries. Watching ambitious founders turn seemingly improbable visions into reality reinforced a lesson Singh eventually applied to herself:

Vision matters—but conviction is what turns vision into reality. That philosophy informs how Singh approaches filmmaking: trust the instinct, hold fast to her faith in God, do the work, and stay committed long enough to realize the vision.

The Next Chapter

Singh is now submitting Once a Man, Twice a Child to the international film festival circuit while developing a feature project that expands the world introduced in the short.

Her work has already attracted attention from New York Weekly and P.O.W.E.R. Magazine, with additional media coverage forthcoming.

But recognition is not the destination. Singh wants to make films that preserve culture, challenge assumptions, and give audiences a chance to see family and adulthood through a wider lens than is typically offered by Hollywood’s familiar templates.

Ultimately, Singh wants to create films capable of becoming shared cultural moments that bring mass audiences together. Her short film is only the beginning.

Audiences can follow the making of Once a Man, Twice a Child and future Emerald Tree Filmworks projects on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where Singh continues to document the process behind her work.

Learn More about Candace Singh:

Through her Influential Women profile: https://influentialwomen.com/connect/Candace-Singh

And social media:

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@candacesingh_emeraldtree?si=5DQ4rzEZDHL0udO0
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emeraldtreefilmworks?igsh=MTI5cjBjbGkyYWVtMg==
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@candacesingh_emeraldtree?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
Influential Women

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Editorial Team
Influential Women
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