When former Tufts University classmates Phil Toledano and Joshua Seftel ran into each other on a New York City street a few years back, their conversation eventually turned to death.
Both had recently lost their fathers, and both were dealing with what Seftel calls “middle-age angst.” So when Toledano, an acclaimed photographer, mentioned a photo project he was undertaking in which he’d be donning costume and makeup to depict the potential ills that could eventually befall him, Seftel was immediately intrigued.
“It’s incredibly weird and disturbing,” says Seftel, an Emmy-winning filmmaker who quickly secured permission to chronicle his friend’s odyssey on camera. “And it’s also, I think, a story that has a lot of universality to it.”
The result is the short documentary film, “The Many Sad Fates of Mr. Toledano,” a dark and occasionally humorous look at one man’s grapple with mortality.
The film, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015 and is being broadcast this fall by the World Channel, features a number of Tufts ties. In addition to Toledano and Seftel, who directed, executive producer Steve Tisch — whose film credits include “Forrest Gump” and “American History X” — is an alum of the university. Co-producer Anna Bick Rowe and associate producer Eric Nichols also attended Tufts.
The film is also part of the New York Times’ Op-Docs series, which serves as an outlet for short documentary films on a wide range of topics.
For Toledano, whose work has appeared everywhere from Vanity Fair to Time to The New Yorker, as well as in exhibitions around the globe, the idea for the project began taking shape in 2006, following the death of his mother. When his father died three years later, he become fixated on the fear of what might become of him.
“Fear of the unpredictable, fear of the right angles in life, fear of terrible things happening to you,” says Toledano, 47, who lost an older sister during childhood. “I’m not afraid of growing old. Am I happy about growing old? Not particularly. What I’m afraid of is terrible things happening.”
At the start of the project, Toledano underwent a DNA test to find out his susceptibility to various physical ailments, and also spoke with fortune tellers to try and determine what ills his future might hold.
Those tasks accomplished, he went to work.
With the help of a makeup artist, he transformed himself into various versions of his potential future self: one who’d suffered a stroke, one who’d become homeless, one who’d committed suicide.
All the while, Seftel filmed, conducting interviews during the hours of makeup application that preceded each photo shoot. And over the next three years, as he continued assuming future identities, Toledano provided a running commentary on the project — his goals, his motivations, the effects it was having on his family.
Indeed, one of the film’s most compelling aspects is the reaction of his wife, Carla Serrano, whose initial reservations about her husband’s bizarre quest — “I was a little frightened of it,” she says in the film — eventually give way to a deeper understanding.
During the course of his work on the project, Toledano says, there was no great epiphany, no Eureka moment. Instead, he says, he simply felt “lighter” upon its completion.
“I realized that the apprehension, the fear that I’d been dwelling on, was no longer there,” he says. “It sort of evaporated.”
And while there’s no denying the project’s dark nature, at its heart, says Seftel, it’s a story about a man confronting his own inevitable demise head on.
“We all have a dialogue with our mortality,” Seftel says. “Some of us choose to tuck that away, some of us chose to consciously not think about it. . . . But this film, I think, asks the question: Why? Why do we tuck it away? And is there some value in confronting it?”
Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @duganarnett.