2022
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
Hummingbirds
“I want to remember this time, last time, and next time. I want to remember it all with no parts missing, because I appreciate even the bad times.” In Laredo, a city in southern Texas on the Mexican border, best friends Silvia and Beba know that the long summer nights of their youth cannot last forever. Their hang-out spots are so familiar but, stuck in an immigration process over which deportation hangs as a constant possibility, home still seems a fragile concept. Between bars, drive-thrus, friends’ couches and the borderlands, they confront the stresses of survival, the future, and community [...]
