Cutting journey Local barber takes clippers to war-torn Ukraine in documentary By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:43 PM CDT Friday, Apr. 11, 2025

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2025 (525 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When people sit down in the barber chair, they are often seeking out more than a haircut. The barbershop is a site of community, a “third place” that isn’t home or work.

For some, the barber chair is a confession booth. For others, a therapist’s couch.

“There’s a lot of human connection that happens in a barbershop,” says Winnipeg barber Jeremy Regan, 51, founder of the Broadway shop Hunter and Gunn.

“There’s not many places where people unplug and you’re just connecting with someone, and you’re making them feel good. There really is only one place where you actually sit and bullshit with each other.”

It’s in that spirit that Regan, along with Winnipeg’s Farpoint Films, created Wandering Barber, a new feature-length documentary premièring April 25 on Super Channel.

Directed by Farpoint’s Chris Charney and starring Regan, Wandering Barber was originally conceived as a travel docuseries — think Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, but with barbering.

Regan would tell the stories of the places he visited through their barbershops and the people in their chairs.

Ukraine was always on the top of Regan’s travel list — “that’s where my great-grandfather immigrated from. I knew him. I was close to him, and I was close to that side of the family,” he says — but a chance to shoot there during wartime in March 2024 changed the tenor of the film.

Here was a chance to see how Ukrainian barbers were supporting the war effort and tell the stories of those fighting for their country. Soldiers, after all, still need to get their hair cut. And so, Regan went.

A barber’s job is to cut hair, yes, but it’s also to make people feel like themselves again. To offer a chance to talk, a slice of normalcy.

The barbers in Ukraine go beyond that, but in the documentary, it’s seeing them perform their regular duties that is often most poignant.

The things Regan heard, in and out of the Ukrainian barbers’ chairs, stayed with him long after he touched back down in Winnipeg.

“As time goes by you kind of get back into your flow with things, but I was seriously disturbed by it for about a good couple of months after I came home,” he says.

“I would just burst into tears thinking of people that I had met along the way. We had heard some really, really, really awful stories.

“When you hear those stories, even in the documentary, it doesn’t hit as hard as when you’re smelling the air, or looking at the houses where some women were taken out and raped and their husbands were digging their own graves.”

Another thing he won’t forget? “The sizzle and sound of a bomb hitting somewhere.”

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About halfway through the film, Regan himself is able to cut the hair of a young soldier named Max at a checkpoint trench about 90 minutes outside Kyiv, toward the frontline.

At first, Max is reluctant to talk. He doesn’t like talking about the war, about what he’s seen. Regan tells him if he was cutting his hair in Winnipeg, he’d tell him to go out dancing and get himself a girl.

Finally, a smile. “I would do it with joy,” Max says in Ukrainian.

Then, the whine of the Regan’s clippers is replaced by the whine of sirens. They take cover in a bunker until the threat passes. It’s not the only time during his visit that Regan will have to take shelter.

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Wandering Barber has been about eight or nine years in the making, the result of a connection made — where else? — at the barbershop. Regan cuts the hair of one of the owners of Farpoint Films, and had offhandedly suggested the idea to him while he was in his chair.

As the wandering barber in the title, the film is also about Regan, whose own logline for the documentary is “middle-aged guy, probably having some sort of midlife crisis, goes to search for something,” he says with a laugh.

The resilience and sacrifice he encountered in Ukraine was a dose of perspective, he says.

“Being in the hospital where we were sitting with those soldiers telling stories and, you know, they take off the cape after doing a haircut and the guy has no legs. He’s 38 years old,” he says.

“I came home and I can honestly say not much bothers me now.”

The doc also follows Regan’s pilgrimage to Tovstenke, the Ukrainian village where his great-grandfather was from. Regan wasn’t sure what he’d hoped to find, and records were scant.

“I was the only person ever in my family to walk down the streets that my grandfather would have walked down,” he says. “That was incredibly moving.”

It’s not lost on him that the sacrifices his great-grandfather made allowed him to have the life he has in Winnipeg.

“I think it solved something in my own head,” he says. “What am I searching for? Why am I going through this little midlife crisis?

“But I’m not searching for anything. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com