Production
Película sin fin, 1995
In the wake of her grandmother’s death, a filmmaker discovers Hi‑8 tapes hidden in a closet, revealing an unfinished documentary from the mid‑90s. As she pieces the film together, she uncovers the overlap between her earliest childhood memories, her grandmother’s public fight for justice against the Pinochet dictatorship, and a city emerging from fascism into the new millennium. Reassembled, the inherited images blur history and imagination, as the unsettled past pulses toward possible futures.
Pleasure Seekers
Pleasure Seekers is a vérité feature length documentary following the intertwined lives of three women in Brooklyn, New York. Mayra, a first-generation immigrant from Ecuador, and mother reflects on her life once rooted in survival over pleasure, now reclaims her relationship to sex and aging. Her daughter Sam, a filmmaker in her twenties uninterested in marriage or children, returns home with a camera and a growing desire to understand her mother—and herself. Alongside her is Emily, her childhood best friend and practically a second daughter to Mayra, who is adamant about finding love. Finding intersectional and intergenerational perspectives on the [...]
KUNIMORI
Under the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, the policy of sōshi-kaimei forced Korean people to replace their names with Japanese: an act of cultural genocide — the eradication of Korean language, customs, identity. In these years, my grandfather’s family was renamed: KuniMori. The eldest of the brothers, Park Young In, became Masami Kuni. Far beyond the end of the colonial period in 1945, he lived and died by this name. This film explores why, and what he left behind. Masami Kuni became a pioneering modern dancer, performing and teaching across Japan, Germany, Denmark, the United States, and Brazil. Passing in [...]
Fighting For The Light
Named after the African cinema classic, Yeelen journeys to Bamako to make a movie about the enigmatic elder who inspired their name. Souleymane Cisse, director of YEELEN, readily assumes the role of godfather to the multimedia artist, but soon begins questioning the millennial’s vision. What starts as a playful personal documentary about the origin of a name, spirals into an existential interrogation of representation, collective imagination, and the power manifested through image creation.
Dear You
DEAR YOU is a story of love and longing, anchored around the slow-burning internal evolution of Grace James, a Pacific Islander woman seeking asylum in the US from her abusive husband. When Grace begins attending dance therapy, she must process the realities of her life: the ever-present threat of deportation, haunting recurring memories of domestic abuse, and the rising tides of climate change impatiently consuming her homeland.
Matininó
Matininó is a work-in-progress film that tells the story of the Villanueva-Rodriguez family, a multi-generational family of Puerto Rican women transforming their experience of misogyny and domestic violence into a science fiction film about an island inhabited exclusively by women warriors. The film moves seamlessly between myth and fact, the fantastical and the mundane, and levity and gravity as the family presents an alternative world intrinsically wrapped into their own. Through re-imagining the hierarchical structures of power and the ways culture weaponizes gender, the family offers both a challenge to the current patriarchal landscape and an invitation to liberation through [...]
Midwaste 2
Long before the internet and social media confirmed the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralized and vernacular medium, Liz and Bree were recording VHS video of themselves while making a documentary about transnational adoptees in Iowa. Reaching back through an extensive tape archive, Midwaste 2: Blood Opus (working title) reconstructs the project Bree and Liz were making then, chronicles a pre opioid epidemic Midwest drug scene, and traces the structural and systemic forces running through each of their lives during the decades after.
You Don’t Know My Name
Prison birth is grim—a mother is shackled to a hospital bed, surrounded by armed guards, and her child is taken from her after delivery. You Don’t Know My Name confronts the often overlooked injustice of forced family separation and the generational trauma wrought by the prison system. Director Tommy Franklin is a formerly incarcerated filmmaker who longs for a mother he never knew. He was taken from her in prison as an infant and placed in the foster system. As a newborn, he was adopted by a white Minnesotan family. He begins therapy to better understand his internal world and [...]
Todo Lo Sólido (All That Is Solid)
Todo Lo Sólido merges documentary and fantasy to tell the story of an island sinking into the Caribbean Sea. Searching for answers to make sense of the imminent storm, a nameless rifter visits a spiritist. After summoning the drifter’s ancestors, the spiritist confirms the sinking of the island. Traveling around present-day Cuba, the drifter will begin a journey in search for the causes behind the potential disappearance of his homeland. The drifter’s voice is simultaneously the voice of the filmmaker merging diaristic and fictionalized points of view. During his journey, he encounters five characters:a historian, a fisherman, a farmer, a [...]
The First Plantation
The stunning Caribbean island of Barbados is the birthplace of many things: rum, Rihanna, and sadly, ghastly innovations in 17th century plantation culture that established the island as the world’s first economy powered entirely by slavery. These modalities would soon spread across the Caribbean and into the American South, helping to lay the groundwork for the systemic racism and white supremacy that still haunt the entire western hemisphere to this day. Upon casting off the British monarchy and becoming the world’s newest republic in 2021, the island has since embarked upon a campaign seeking reparations from its former colonizer. Chief [...]
