Production
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 [...]
What Lies Over the Mountain
This film explores the intersection of migration, identity, belonging, and the deep ties between personal and collective histories. At its heart is the intimate, multi-generational story of my family, focusing on my mother—an Ecuadorian immigrant who moved to a small, conservative Italian village in the 1980s for love. At a time when Italy was only beginning to confront the realities of immigration, she became the first foreigner in the village. But she was more than just an outsider; she was an educated, vegetarian, and progressive woman in a place where tradition reigned, challenging the expectations placed upon her. By the [...]
Finding Má
After 20 years apart, an Amerasian - Vietnamese/Black family shattered by the foster care and prison systems reunites to heal old wounds and rebuild their family, starting with finding their unhoused mother in the streets of Sacramento. Finding Má is a deeply personal feature-length documentary that follows my family’s journey to reconnect with our estranged mother and uncover the truth about our fractured family history. As an Amerasian-Vietnamese and Black filmmaker, I was separated from my family at a young age and raised in the foster care system. After spending much of my life incarcerated, I was released and set [...]
All Fixed Up
After attempting to change their wayward queer heir, a desperate family resorts to a masquerade that tests the limits of love, generational ties, and transnational understanding.
OAKLEAD
In Oakland, California, we fight to protect our children from lead poisoning in our own homes and schools – and confront over a century of environmental racism. OAKLEAD is a feature-length documentary, currently in post-production, about the longest, ongoing pediatric epidemic in U.S. history. I picked up a camera when I learned that my neighborhood is one of 3,000 communities across the United States experiencing lead poisoning at an even higher rate than Flint, Michigan. This crisis disproportionately affects Black children and other children of color. OAKLEAD centers the communities most affected by the lead poisoning epidemic, both as part [...]
The Best Film In The Whole World
desc short
Wood Street
Once Oakland’s largest homeless encampment, Wood Street is the last stop for unhoused “brothers,” John and LaMonté. They moved there eight years ago after police pushed them from other encampments around the city. After a devastating fire, their tight-knit community faces eviction. It’s their goal to stop it.
The Quiet Hours
After inheriting a nearly abandoned seaside hotel, estranged siblings discover that every room contains traces of a family tragedy no one remembers the same way. Over the course of one storm-filled weekend, they must decide whether to preserve the stories they've inherited—or uncover the truth that could destroy what's left of their family.
Untitled KQT Project
UNTITLED KQT PROJECT is a feature documentary that follows a chosen family of queer and trans nightlife performers in Seoul, Korea, as they navigate gender, seek belonging, and protect their freedoms, all while joyfully rejecting societal pressures to conform. Throughout the film, glimpses of the filmmaking process are interwoven with footage of the protagonists’ day-to-day lives, establishing the film as a conversation between queers in the homeland and those in the diaspora. In bringing these elements together, the film traces a queer, transnational vision for an abundant future that is relevant to all of us as we navigate ongoing global [...]
