2023
Ilana Coleman
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.
Tommy Franklin
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 [...]
Aurora Brachman
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.
Cyrus Moussavi
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 [...]
Hannah Myers
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… [...]
Paige Bethmann
Ku Stevens, 18, has the skill and drive to become an elite runner. But he struggles to navigate the sport’s glorified individualism and the values of interconnectedness he was brought up with on the Paiute reservation. When thousands of Native children’s remains are discovered, Ku learns of his family’s painful history which forces him to reimagine his identity. In an act of reverence, Ku runs the same 50-mile escape route his great-grandfather used to flee an Indian boarding school at age 8. Remaining Native is a coming-of-age story that intertwines a dark history with the hopeful journey of one teenager [...]
Tashi Tamate Weiss
A queer woman of Japanese descent grieves the spirit she met and parted ways with through her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. She dreams for many nights of a taiko drum with a koi fish sticking out of one side, holding a jade ball in its mouth, representing a world restored to wholeness. Kizuna, meaning the bonds that cannot be broken, tells the story of the construction of this sacred drum and the alchemizing of loss into ancestral kinship through ritual. The drum named Kizuna by her side, the woman goes on to hold rituals for others who have undergone abortions [...]
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 [...]
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… [...]
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 [...]
