2023
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 [...]
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.
Remaining Native
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 [...]
Kizuna
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 [...]
