Post-Production

MEANT TO BE MADDIE chronicles a decade in the life of a North Carolina transgender teenager as she navigates her identity and adolescence with the unwavering support of her family. An intimate and funny coming of age story, Maddie’s journey unfolds against the backdrop of growing anti-trans rhetoric, legislation, and conservative backlash against the LGBTQ community. When Maddie was six years old, she started first grade as a girl, the gender she always knew she was. While she was assigned male at birth, she had been telling her parents, Katie and Craig, about her gender for as long as she [...]

SOMEBODY’S GONE tells Brother Taylor’s story through a remarkable archive of video shot by his eldest son, Hubert. Driven by a divine vision to document Black life in the South, Hubert amassed hundreds of hours of footage – church services, parties, funerals and incredible musical performances – shot with a sensitive eye and a long view of history. He even purchased the archive of the defunct local TV station. “I filmed the Black side of town,” Hubert said, “and bought the archive of the white.” Adding contemporary interviews and verite footage, SOMEBODY’S GONE completes the film Hubert set out to [...]

In September 2020, my 70-year-old father came out as gay. As he forges a new liberated life in the American South and my mother reckons with the end of their 45-year marriage in the Midwest, I am relearning how to be a daughter. DADDY is one family’s coming-of-age story that began as an old man’s coming out story. The film explores the unknowability of those we love most and the desire to try anyway. Our story tracks the implications of liberation in a religious, working class context, testifying that the gap between oppression and freedom is a journey worth pursuing… [...]

In a tiny home on the outskirts of an Oregon forest, a mother and son—Tot and Kevin—navigate the mundanity of intergenerational living with their five cats. As the years pass, Tot begins to reflect on the hardships she endured as a young Vietnamese woman living in Saigon during the War in Vietnam—all of which she has written about in a book. As she reads her writing for the first time to Kevin, he develops a better appreciation of his mother’s journey while also trying to understand its connection to his own journey. Filmed over the course of ten years, Mai [...]

Under a backdrop of colliding belief systems, a skeptical Hmong-American filmmaker is told she has been chosen to become a shaman, setting her on a decade-long journey to understand her community's ancestral spiritual traditions. Spirited is a poignant and introspective documentary following Joua over a decade of her life as she struggles to reconnect with her people’s belief system and grapples with the decision to accept or reject this calling. Her intercultural and interfaith family must sort through their differences as the symptoms of Joua’s “shaman sickness” worsen, signaling that it is time to make a choice. Joua connects with [...]

The Inventory is a feature film that juxtaposes the nonfiction testimonials of mothers searching for their sons who were disappeared in Mexico and a fictional bureaucratic committee searching for a missing word in the dictionary.

Sydney, a gregarious heroin user, moves into a Chicago recovery home and befriends Julia, an alcoholic filmmaker. When Sydney gets pregnant and returns to her abusive boyfriend, both women reenter the world of abuse and addiction, a world that so often demands we choose between protecting each other or saving ourselves. An intimate portrait of friendship made in the trenches of overlapping crises, This is Me Loving You is a manifesto of radical care showing what it means to heal ourselves in the midst of systems that promise support but instead hold us down.

The Full Thao follows comedian Thao P. Nguyen over two years preparing a new comedy show while weaving in her daily life that forms material for her performance routine. She artfully cares for her 3 year-old son while creating a show about motherhood in “chunks.” Demonstrating that there’s no “one way of doing queer,” Thao’s balancing act is to remain true to herself in her roles as a Vietnamese American daughter, a mother, and a member of the queer community.

Pinball is a feature documentary about Yosef–a typical American college kid, who is coming of age twenty years after the U.S. invaded his home country of Iraq and displaced his family. Yosef was four years old when they fled Baghdad. Of all places, they received asylum in Louisville. Pinball follows Yosef as he straddles two cultures and struggles to become something greater than what his situation allows. Yosef finds every excuse to miss class, works a restaurant job to help his family out, and lives for his social life. His dad Mohammed wants him to help fix and sell used [...]

Emily Taylor, an Oakland-based queer Black rock climbing coach, fearlessly trains a diverse group of BIPOC girls and non-binary kids, including her home-schooled daughter, to conquer not only the towering cliffs but also the pervasive discrimination they face in the great outdoors. As Emily empowers her students to claim their place in nature, she embarks on a profound journey of self-care, navigating the challenges that come with working to dismantle an industry rife with institutionalized discriminatory practices.