Post-Production
Untitled EJ Lee Documentary
The EJ Lee film is a feature-length documentary that uses verite and archival footage to take an intimate look inside a female Asian American superstar’s life through two timelines: EJ's historical journey as a trailblazing player and dedicated assistant coach in the 1980s, and her present-day narrative tracking the final chapters of EJ’s 40-year basketball career as a first-time college head coach in West Texas.
The Inventory
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.
Pinball
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 [...]
Somebody’s Gone
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 [...]
HIGHER 15
Director Ameha Molla learns the untold story of his uncle Kiflu, a revolutionary who fought against Ethiopia’s brutal Derg regime in the 1970s. Kiflu was imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Higher 15 prison in Addis Ababa, but he ultimately escapes. He is smuggled into the United States where he begins a new life in the Denver suburbs, working at the U.S. Postal Service and raising a family. Thirty-three years after his arrival, he comes face to face with the prison guard who had tortured him and others decades earlier. Ameha discovers his uncle’s story in a Denver Post article [...]
Daddy
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… [...]
Mai American
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 [...]
We Arrive With Fire | Ne-kah Nuee’m Mehl Mech
WE ARRIVE WITH FIRE explores how fire came to the people, the relationship fire has with the land, how settlers sought to separate fire and land, and the efforts of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC), led by Executive Director Margo Robbins, to reunite fire and the land in a good way. Unlike Western stories that focus on protagonist growth, WE ARRIVE WITH FIRE uses Native storytelling methods focusing on the moral lessons and practices audiences can adopt. WE ARRIVE WITH FIRE is organized around six chapters–Origins, Fire, Air, Land, Water, and Fire–that reflect the cyclical nature of Indigenous storytelling. [...]
Allensworth: The Town That Refuses to Die
Allensworth was founded in 1908 in California’s Central Valley as a haven for Black families. The town thrived on agriculture and small businesses but suffered when drought hit and a land company refused to drill promised wells. Allensworth would nearly vanish after its founder’s death and the diversion of their railroad to a nearby, all-white town. But a few families persisted and fought to preserve the town’s legacy, transforming Allensworth into “the town that refuses to die.” Now, Allensworth is once again put to the test. After years of drought and infrastructure challenges including a failing water system, its roughly [...]
This is Me Loving You
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.
