By: Elowen Gray
Candace Singh spent a decade at two of Wall Street’s most demanding institutions, rising from Analyst to Vice President at Goldman Sachs in consecutive years before moving to JPMorgan to conduct due diligence on alternative investments. By every conventional measure, she had made it. Then, in March 2026, she walked away from corporate finance for the second time to make films full-time.
The first departure was a trial run. Singh left to hone her craft, learning the fundamentals of writing, directing, and producing before returning to corporate life. The second time, there was no plan to go back. Within weeks of leaving JPMorgan, a friend called asking for help on a feature film set. It wrapped in May.
The leap looked sudden from the outside. Inside, it had been building for years.
A Story Hollywood Wasn’t Telling
Singh’s debut short film, “Once a Man, Twice a Child,” follows a young adult accompanying an aging parent to a doctor’s appointment. The scene is ordinary. The dynamic underneath is not one Singh saw reflected on screen growing up.
She had spent years watching television that celebrated independence, the kind that showed young adults moving out, building lives apart from their parents, and treating leaving the nuclear household as the default marker of adulthood. Her own life looked different. Raised in New York by Guyanese parents, Singh made a deliberate choice to stay rooted at home, not out of inability to leave, but out of devotion. She wanted to be present for her parents’ care, finances, and doctor’s appointments in the years she still had with them.
That choice put her at odds with a familiar cultural script. In her words, Hollywood tends to cast adults who live with their parents as either failures to launch or overgrown children. Singh saw something else in her own family: a cousin who performed chest compressions to save her father’s life, another who visited a hospital daily for months during a parent’s recovery, and her own decision to leave a Wall Street all-nighter at 4 a.m. to rush her father to the emergency room.
Her decade on Wall Street sharpened an instinct to notice patterns most people miss. Working alongside colleagues across London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Bangalore, she began to recognize a shared, unspoken frustration. Many of her international coworkers felt their family structures were misread through a Western lens, and found it easier to stay quiet than to explain. That recognition became the seed of her mission as a filmmaker, to give a name and a face to the young adults quietly caring for their parents, rather than let the story go untold.
Betting on the Harder Path
Leaving finance was not a simple decision. Singh had taken on the financial responsibility of retiring her parents early after her grandmother passed away during the pandemic, prioritizing security for them ahead of her own. Producing her first short film while working full-time at JPMorgan meant sacrificing weekends, holidays, and personal days for years, watching the project’s timeline stretch longer than she wanted.
Eventually, she recognized that dividing her attention between two demanding careers was quietly stalling the one she cared about most. As a young woman who also hopes to marry and build her own family one day, she understood that further delay risked letting indecision outweigh what she actually wanted to achieve. Having already chosen to prioritize her career over family-building, she decided the sacrifice would only be worth it if she went all in. She chose to go all-in on filmmaking, self-producing “Once a Man, Twice a Child” to retain full creative control over how the story was told.
That control extended to casting. Conventional wisdom said the film needed recognizable actors to gain traction. Singh ran an extensive search and organized her own casting calls, but no one could replicate the specific, lived-in chemistry she needed. She ultimately cast her own father and uncle in the lead roles, spending months running improv sessions to build their comfort in front of a camera and shaping scenes around their natural rhythms and more than sixty years of brotherly history. She cast herself as the daughter, in part to help her father feel at ease on set. The result, she says, is a living snapshot of her family’s dynamic that she will carry with her wherever the film goes next.
What Wall Street Taught Her About Betting on Vision
Singh credits part of her conviction to the years she spent evaluating which companies were worth backing. Her roles at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan put her close to the earliest financial signals behind companies that would later become household names, including OpenAI and SpaceX. Watching those bets pay off reinforced a belief she carried into her own career change: that a clear vision, pursued with consistent conviction, can outrun the odds.
It is a lesson she traces back further than her time on Wall Street. Her high school yearbook quote was a line from Abraham Lincoln about the importance of one’s own resolution to succeed, and it has stayed with her since. Along the way, she has also learned to distinguish a true goal from temporary setbacks that can look like failure in the moment, treating disappointments as prompts to re-examine her direction rather than as reasons to abandon it.
That belief now anchors her plans for Emerald Tree Filmworks, the production company she founded. In the near term, she aims to screen “Once a Man, Twice a Child” at international festivals. Longer term, her ambitions extend to major industry recognition, including the Academy Awards, and to films that create the kind of shared cultural moments audiences once experienced collectively, from Michael Jackson’s 1993 Super Bowl performance to Live Aid.
Singh has already begun to draw industry recognition for the leap. She has been named to P.O.W.E.R Magazine’s Summer 2026 issue as CEO of Emerald Tree Filmworks, with a feature as one of the magazine’s Women of the Month planned for its Fall 2026 issue, and has been recognized by the Influential Women platform for her work as a director, writer, producer, and financier.
Audiences curious to see the world Singh is building can follow along on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where she shares glimpses of Emerald Tree Filmworks and the making of her debut short.
For Singh, the through-line between her two careers is not as far apart as it might seem. Both required her to identify what others were missing, trust her own read of the situation, and commit fully once she saw it clearly. The difference now is that the vision on the table is entirely her own.
