Meet Alisa Allapach and Phillip Montgomery, the daughter and son-in-law of Al Allapach (the same guy whose charming mug graces our homepage). When Al was a young boy in Bangkok, he and his friends would jump in the banks of the Chao Phraya River and hold on to the back of tugboats to more quickly get from one side of the city to the other. Like Uber only more wet (and free of charge). You’ll never get a straight answer from Al as to why he would do such a ridiculously crazy and dangerous thing, but we like to think it was his resourcefulness and bare-knuckle grit to “dive” in further than most would dare (literally and metaphorically). So, Alisa and Phil look to him as a source of inspiration in their own willingness to get wet and make great things happen. So why the name? Al Allapach is why… oh and because Paul Simon is a genius.

Now as a dynamic directing duo, Alisa, a former professional figure skater turned actress glides into filmmaking with the same elegance she once did on ice – minus the cold and the sequins. Having worked with some of the greats - seriously, from Clint Eastwood to Jody Hill - she was hungry to tell her own stories. So, she absorbed, learned, and has found her own voice in the work she directs for Call Me Al, focused on 1. Being socially relevant and 2. making it gut-punch fun! Phil, meanwhile, injects all the charm of an NYU film grad into the mix. Sure, a Tisch School of the Arts diploma may have the edge of a butter knife, but it's been just sharp enough to help him slice through the industry's baloney, directing work for big brands, big networks, and yada yada yada. Who cares, anyway...

Their combined efforts? Cinematic gold. They first made waves with “The Things I Miss…” for Instagram's pandemic-era campaign, which went as viral as cat videos but with more artistic flair. Then came their collaborations with Jobcase and Footjoy which saw their unique vision of turning the mundane into something kinda’ cool, weird and fun. So between Alisa's levitating pirouettes and Phil's penchant for narrative gravitas, they’ve bagged accolades for projects with bigwigs like Deloitte, Cox Business, Google, Uber, and IBM.