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

Yasmin Yassin is a filmmaker, photographer, and scientist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her artistic practice explores subcultures and the invisible networks that hold them together. Her storytelling follows the friction—and harmony—between tradition and modern identity, guided by her East African oral-storytelling heritage.

Her directorial debut, Dhaanto, a short documentary on a Somali dance troupe, screened at the 2024 Minneapolis–St. Paul International Film Festival, the Millennium Film Workshop in New York, and internationally in East Africa and Canada, alongside community screenings across the Twin Cities. Yassin recently completed her short film Woman Land and is currently writing her first narrative feature. She was awarded the SPNN Fresh Vantage grant and is a member of FilmNorth. She has directed for Nike and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and has collaborated with Apple, the New York Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and the Walker Art Center.

Project Statement

Call Me Back is a narrative short exploring emerging adulthood and social connection. Sofia is a young twenty-something professional woman. Against the wishes of her culturally traditional family, she is living a fairly mundane and repetitive life alone in a new city. Things begin to change when she receives a voicemail that wasn’t meant for her.

The film explores themes of isolation—how we may sometimes reach for intimacy and belonging in unexpected places. It digs into the concept of para-social relationships and the ways digital spaces can offer both comfort and escape. Call Me Back offers a glimpse into how technology can be used to self-protect, substituting fleeting connections for otherwise more meaningful, and sometimes difficult-to-build, relationships in the real world.

Prakshi Malik is an award-winning filmmaker who works collaboratively to make films that sway our collective imaginations. Raised in Delhi, India, and now based in Minnesota, Malik’s narrative shorts—including Baahar and Embers—have screened at festivals such as the New Orleans Film Festival, PBS Short Film Festival, Jaipur International Film Festival, Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, and the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, among others. Her work has been supported by Austin Film Society, City of Minneapolis and Saint Paul Neighborhood Network. Malik’s background in dance and ensemble theatre influences her empathy as a director and her rhythm as an editor. She holds a BA in Media and Cultural Studies from Macalester College and MFA in Film Production from the University of Texas at Austin.

Project Statement

The Untitled Navigating Faith Project (working title) is an experimental documentary. The film features BIPOC participants who share intimate stories of moving away from their religious upbringings and navigating new paths of faith and belonging. We are often introduced to religion and faith as children from our parents and elders. As we grow up and re-form our worldviews, our relationship with faith can change in profound ways that shifts our connections, celebrations, and ways of being. Weaving together oral history, storytelling, and personal archives with intimate moments ranging from mundane to sacred, the film opens a window onto the experiences of in-betweenness and the evolving nature of identity.

Photo Credit: Shashwat Malik

Raven Johnson is a Liberian American filmmaker from Minnesota. Her work explores the realities of Black experiences in predominantly White spaces around the Midwest. Johnson is an assistant professor of Moving Images at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. She is a 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow, and a 2022 SFFILM and Kenneth Rainin Fellow. Johnson received her MFA from NYU Tisch and is in development on her debut feature which has already received support from SFFILM and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Project Statement

Set during the height of Covid-19 and racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd, Ruby: Portrait of a Black Teen in an American Suburb follows the story of Ruby (16), a Liberian American teenager. She copes with her parents’ sudden separation by seeking TikTok fame alongside her best friend, Kiki (16), but when Kiki begins dating a much older man, Ruby resolves to do anything to keep her best friend by her side.

Photo Credit: Raven Jackson

Charlie Ainsworth is a Deaf filmmaker, writer, and founder of Angry Deaf People, an indie company committed to expanding deaf narratives on screen. Since 2018, he has written nine short films, directing six, with his work—notably How to Caption Your Movie and Dinner Table Syndrome—widely recognized in Deaf film communities worldwide.

Ainsworth has an MFA in screenwriting from the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts. He blends the Deaf experience, social critique, and the absurd in his works. His next project, The Road South, explores how sometimes the Deaf experience can become quite absurd, especially in the eyes of the norm.

He remains committed to growing the next wave of Deaf Cinema. Not just writing and directing but ensuring that untold Deaf stories are produced, seen, and… oh, god. I’m about to drop a cliche… heard.

Project Statement

When a deaf mortician is asked to embalm her estranged grandmother, she’s pulled back into the orbit of the hearing family she was never truly part of. The Road South explores the divide between deaf and hearing relatives caused by a lifetime of language barriers.

Sara A. Osman is a legal advocate, documentary filmmaker, and cultural practitioner from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is a co-founder of The Qalanjo Project, a Somali cultural organization and creative arts studio in Minneapolis that promotes cultural production, community archival work, and grassroots social change through the arts. She develops programs that uplift artistry in community; the themes of home, belonging, and cultural preservation are central to her work. Osman is a lifelong community organizer and anti-racism advocate who has worked extensively on migration and human rights issues across multiple regions, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Her legal and creative interests lie at the intersection of cultural and legal frameworks, how policies shape identities and narratives, and how filmmaking can serve as a form of advocacy and resistance. Her artmaking has received support from organizations including NeXt Doc, the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, Firelight Media, the City of Minneapolis’ Department of Arts & Cultural Affairs, Mamá Papaya, and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Project Statement

When the Sky Mourns With Us is a feature-length experimental documentary film that investigates Somali death culture and grieving practices across space and time. The film examines how communities have honored the dead through precolonial rituals, Islamic burial rites, and the collective traditions that once shaped everyday life. It simultaneously traces the disruptions and adaptations brought by war, displacement, and migration. Through poetry, oral testimony, and intimate observation, the film traces how Somalis honor the dead, carry memory, and navigate loss across generations and geographies. At once elegy and inquiry, the film seeks to explore what endures when mourning is fractured, how rituals evolve and change over time, and what remains when grief is experienced both collectively and in isolation.

Olu Famule is a visual artist and filmmaker, co-founder and one of the festival directors of Cinefilmu—a QTBIPOC-centered film festival. He draws on his cultural background as Nigerian American and experience as a cinematographer, video editor, and event organizer to tell stories, mentor emerging artists, and develop innovative ways to bring creatives together.

Famule is also a co-founder of TDM5, a visual arts incubator that supports emerging Black visual artists in releasing their first projects while organizing art and film events that engage the community.

Project Statement

Sister Belonging is a short documentary that follows a group of African women in northern Minnesota and rural Wisconsin and explores their close-knit community amidst the isolating and often hostile Midwest. Blending documentary-style storytelling with an abstract lens and the addition of fictional elements, the film immerses viewers into their world.

Photo Credit: Sunmi Famule