Rodrigo Olivar is a multidisciplinary director from Mexico City, based in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to shining a light on multicultural narratives. He holds a BFA in Media Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana (CDMX) and an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts (New York). For over eight years, he served as Head of Video at Remezcla, the leading Latino media company, where he directed and produced award-winning content. His films have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, NY Latino Film Festival, and Morelia Film Festival, among many others. His latest short, Thank You, Have a Nice Day, won the Max Latino Short Competition. Through his work, Rodrigo explores the intersections of culture, identity, and resilience, crafting visually compelling stories that connect communities and spark dialogue.

Project Statement

We Save Us (El pueblo salva al pueblo) is a feature-length documentary about Indigenous Mexican delivery workers in New York City confronting a wave of violent robberies. With no support from authorities, they draw on the traditions of their hometown to form a civil guard, reclaiming safety and dignity. As their organizing grows, new challenges test their resolve and expand their solidarity, revealing the strength of collective action.

The film blends cinematic vérité with on-body cameras, social media content, and motion graphics to create an immersive portrait of workers who keep New York running yet remain invisible. Supported by Gotham Week Project Market and Tribeca Work-in-Progress, We Save Us reframes narratives of labor, migration, and justice—showing not only the hardships these workers endure, but also the power of community to envision change.

Matt Nadel is a filmmaker and journalist interested in stories about justice, survival, and historical memory. His short documentaries have been distributed by outlets like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and PBS. Matt’s most recent film, Cashing Out (The New Yorker 2025), tells the story of a controversial industry that emerged in the early days of AIDS—and his own unlikely connection to it. Previously, Matt directed An Unlikely Last Resort for Getting Out of Prison, a first-person documentary about clemency released by New York Times Opinion, and CANS Can’t Stand (The New Yorker 2023), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. Matt is from Florida and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Project Statement

In the shadows of the American prison system, a network of self-taught legal warriors, known as jailhouse lawyers, are using the law to dismantle the carceral machine from within. Jailhouse Lawyer, the debut feature documentary from director Matt Nadel, enters this hidden world through the story of Quentin Lewis, a veteran jailhouse lawyer in New York who defends his peers against the abuses of the prison system—and, in the process, offers them hope, protection, and a path to rehabilitation. But even with an extraordinary record of legal victories, there's one case Lewis is still fighting to win: his own. Blending vérité captured in prison, intimate longitudinal interviews, and never-before-digitized archives, Jailhouse Lawyer offers a rare portrait of the hidden figures who, from behind prison walls, are using the law to transform themselves and the system that confines them.

Photo Credit: Luz Gallardo for ITVS

Crystal Kayiza is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. A member of the New Negress Film Society, she is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and the Sundance Ignite Fellowship. Her most recent film, Rest Stop, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the 2023 Jury Prize for Best US Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival. Her short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and released by The New Yorker. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by POV. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Crystal is currently in production on her first feature film.

Project Statement

As keepers of one of the oldest Black cemeteries in Mississippi, The Worthy Women of Watkins Street nurture the liminal space between past, present, and future. The Gardeners is a feature non-fiction film that archives the labor of these aging worldbuilders, offering a blueprint to navigate memory, legacy and mortality while revealing the divine spirit residing in their daily lives.

Ash Goh Hua is a Singapore-born and raised, New York-based filmmaker. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Goh tells personal stories that reveal the inherently embodied politics of relation, society and culture. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Goh is a 2024 Berlinale Talent and a 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient.

Project Statement

SUBTERRANEA is a short narrative film about Fang Lin, a teenager who does not want to exist. Between her naggy mother, a stifling environment, and a falling out with her best friend, she feels utterly trapped in ennui. Meanwhile, the magic of Singapore’s natural world begins to rumble, threatening to break the levee.

Photo Credit: Dan Chein

Sekiya Dorsett’s thought-provoking films have won her much praise. The Revival: Women and the Word, which premiered in 2017 and was quickly acquired by Women Make Movies. Dorsett also directed a four-episode documentary series for NBC News titled Stonewall Revolution which is currently on Peacock—an achievement that earned her both a GLAAD Media Award and NLGJA’s Excellence in Digital Journalism accolade. Barnard College named her their inaugural Artemis Rising Foundation Fellow for excellence in non-fiction storytelling. Her most recent film, Caribbean Queen in association with Caribbean Equality Project, addressing LGBTQ stigma in Caribbean communities, premiered at BAM during NewFest 2023, earning both the Audience Award and recognition for her directing. She is a Firelight Media Fellow for 2024–2026. Her films have been screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Urbanworld Film Festival, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Outfest Film Festival.

Project Statement

Amid shifting borders and rising intolerance, a Black lesbian couple from the Caribbean looks back on twenty years of love and longing. As they attempt to become mothers in a country that threatens to erase them, their story becomes a tender, urgent act of resistance. 20 Years of Longing is a personal memory, a collective memory, and an ongoing future. It is an intimate, character-driven documentary that follows a married Black lesbian couple from Haiti and the Bahamas, as they navigate love, immigration, faith, and queer family-making in a country that refuses to fully see us. It is not just a love story. It is a testimony.

Photo Credit: Rick Day NYC

Lydia Cornett is a filmmaker, composer and artist. Her work explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression across nonfiction and experimental forms. Her films have screened at festivals such as True/False Film Festival, Camden Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Sheffield DocFest, Slamdance, BAMCinemaFest, Hamptons International Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where she was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker in 2023. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, POV Shorts, Vimeo Staff Picks, Nowness, and Paper Magazine.

Cornett has held residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Jacob Burns Film Center, UnionDocs, BRICLab, and Marble House Project. She has received support for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Pulitzer Center, the Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Field of Vision, the Fulbright Program, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Project Statement

The Grain of Voice, Lydia's feature directorial debut, explores the ineffable essence of the human voice and its bodily origins, weaving together portraits of vocalists who blur the boundaries of genre, gender, ability, and technology.

Photo Credit: Amber Elison

Safiyah Chiniere is a Jamaican American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She uses film to amplify the stories and voices of people of color, women, femmes, and the LGBTQIA+ community, often disrupting the gender binary and expanding how we see identity on screen. A self-taught filmmaker, New Jersey-born and Virginia Beach-bred, Chiniere grounds her work in the interior lives of these communities and has developed a visual style that moves with care and intention. Chiniere’s short film You Don’t Have to Like Me premiered at NewFest, Frameline, Inside Out, and BFI Flare London and presents a fresh, intimate approach to capturing faces, bodies, and the many expressions of closeness. She slows the pace and magnifies space to make room for vulnerability, authenticity, and catharsis, highlighting people and moments that are often overlooked, dismissed, or delegitimized while maintaining wholehearted and sincere storytelling. 

Project Statement

All For Her is a portrait of a granddaughter’s love and care for her grandmother while she fights to hold on to her own independence and navigate dating as a lesbian woman. The film explores the complexities of caregiving and how it can quietly pull you away from yourself. During COVID, Chiniere cared for her grandmother, who was unexpectedly diagnosed with dementia and passed away silently in 2023, the day after her birthday. That loss moved her to honor her grandmother’s legacy while staying true to the meaning of caretaking and the realities of balancing a social and romantic life.

Many caregivers sacrifice personal dreams to show up for the people we love. This film highlights the resilience and beauty in that choice—the constant push and pull between duty and the need for selfhood. Grounded in queer experience and tender intimacy, the story makes room for stillness. All For Her gives voice to those caring for family while trying to live their own lives and shedding light on the emotional toll caregiving often hides.

Photo Credit: Kinga Gurba

Julia Chien is a Taiwanese American filmmaker and animator born and raised in suburban Maryland, currently based in Brooklyn. Julia’s films all center lonely, lowly animals. There is something extremely genuine and relatable about being alone at the bottom of a food chain. Her films explore the internal, the textural, and the gooey. Julia’s practice plays with traditional mixed-media animation techniques, live puppetry, and how the two can intersect. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as Animafest Zagreb, Sweaty Eyeballs, Athens Animfest, Animafantasia, and more. Julia recently performed her first theatrical work, a multimedia puppet piece, as an artist-in-residence with the Object Movement Festival at the Center at West Park. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 with a BFA in Film/Animation/Video. She now teaches traditional animation techniques at RISD. She works professionally as a VFX artist and has worked on Emmy Award-winning productions.

Project Statement

My mother grew up on a farm in a small village just outside of Taichung, Taiwan, during the Kuomintang’s takeover of the country. She lived in a big family of four daughters and three sons. Her father, my grandfather, was a stern and often abusive patriarch, but he adored his animals. He kept dogs, pigs, turkeys, and chickens. When my mother was nine, her uncle visited the farm with a gift: a Formosan Rock Macaque in a cage. My grandfather named her Saru. Based on my mother’s true story, her name was SARU is an experimental animated narrative short film using a mixture of ink, paint-on-glass, shadow, and manipulated live-action footage. Through the character of Saru, the film explores the complex family dynamics my mother experienced as a child and still experiences today. Saru spent years caged and chained to my family. She deserves an honorable end to her story.

Photo Credit: Gregory Shark

Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator, director, writer, musician, etc. She is the creator of Agoraphilia, a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film Our Bed Is Green, which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous Oscar-qualifying festivals worldwide, winning “Best Animation” at the Tacoma Film Festival. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital about mall kiosk owners. Before moving into animation, she created comics, some of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Fader, Inverse, and other publications. Her work often focuses on fiddly characters, technology, and perplexing visual minutiae.

Project Statement

Venerations is an animated short film about a religious mother and her very online daughter who independently obsess over two different sets of mysterious human remains: the relics of a beloved virgin Saint and the case file of an unidentified murder victim. Surreal and subtly comic, Venerations reflects on things like mythmaking, materiality, and the strangeness of womanhood.

Photo Credit: Will Simpson

Siji Awoyinka is an award-winning multidisciplinary aural and visual storyteller. Born in London to Nigerian parents, he spent much of his early childhood in Lagos and London before moving to New York to further pursue his creative ambitions. His documentary feature film, Elder’s Corner, premiered at Sheffield Docs, UK, DOC NYC, Blackstar Film Festival, HOTDOCS, and went on to win an Ethnomusicology Commendation Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, and the Audience Award for Best Sounds Feature at Indie Memphis Film Festival (2021). His projects have received funding support from NYSCA, Open Society, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lucius & Eva Eastman Foundation.

Project Statement

Ejire is a feature-length documentary film that explores the mysticism of twins through the power of memory, ritual, restitution, and song. It follows the iconic Lijadu Sisters, a beloved Nigerian musical duo, through the final years of Kehinde’s life and Taiwo's reemergence.

Using archival footage, family pictures, vintage memorabilia, and scenes reenacted and captured on 16mm film, the film seeks to invoke and explore the past, and how memory/alternate memory may act as a catharsis for healing, guidance, and transformation. Ejire serves not only as a tribute to the unique twin connection but also as a broader exploration of identity, loss, and the human desire for wholeness in the face of profound change.

Photo Credit: Yetunde Babaeko