Photo credit: Chris Hardi

Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2021 "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and DOC NYC's 2022 "40 Under 40." His debut feature documentary, Cane Fire, played at the 2020 Hot Docs Film Festival as well as the 2021 MoMA Doc Fortnight and won Best Documentary Feature at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the 2021 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Cane Fire was distributed theatrically by Cinema Guild and is available to stream on The Criterion Channel. The film has received praise in RogerEbert.com, Jacobin, Film Threat, and Hyperallergic, among several other outlets. His short documentary about two former workers of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Third Shift, won “Best Short Documentary” at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival and previously streamed on The Criterion Channel. Anthony has been featured in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Screen Slate, and HuffPost.

After more than a century of industrial farming and testing of harmful pesticides from both the sugar and biotech industries on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, feature documentary The Experiment Station looks towards a growing food sovereignty movement led by Native Hawaiians and how it contends with Hawaii’s legacy of colonialism and extractive capitalism. What was once considered an impossibility in restructuring Hawaii’s economy has now become an ecological necessity for survival.

Dominique Nieves is a disabled Nuyorican filmmaker. She was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Writer-Director for her Telly Award-winning magic realism film, Our Lady Lupe, which was produced in association with PBS for their Primetime Broadcast Special, The Latino Experience. She used Our Lady Lupe to feature her favorite things: Latina leads, brujería, and a dog.

Nieves entered the industry as an actress, but one-dimensional roles for Latinas led her to found Iron Glove Productions, highlighting underrepresented voices authentically on-screen. Her work has garnered recognition from CINEQUEST, HollyShorts, and screened throughout the United States. She has been recognized as a Telemundo Unstoppable Woman and was recently honored by Columbia University’s Lion Pride, celebrating her as an outstanding alumnus who uses her artistic work to uplift her community. As an ardent supporter of Latinx voices, Dominique created the Read Latinx Writers Initiative, pairing over 450 emerging Latinx writers with mentors.

Revolve is a narrative film centering Zaya, a disabled Afro-Latina teen who takes on the intersection of gun violence and gentrification in her Washington Heights neighborhood through artistic advocacy. In an attempt to take control of saying goodbye to her first love, she takes him to her art studio hidden in her uncle’s Botánica. She scoffs at Santería, but a close encounter with gun violence may soon make her a believer. Zaya is distinct from other superheroes because she doesn’t look like one; not because she’s a girl, or Afro-Latina, or using a wheelchair, but because she’s not green, or gigantic, or covered in armor.

photo credit: David Noles

Noah Schamus (they/them) is a filmmaker and educator. Their first narrative feature, Summer Solstice premiered at Provincetown Film Festival and has gone on to play at festivals including Deauville, Mill Valley, BendFilm, and NewFest. The film was the recipient of the Panavision New Filmmaker grant and won the Platige Image Award at US in Progress at the American Film Festival.

Brit Fryer (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based queer and trans filmmaker, originally from Chicago’s South Side. He has directed several films, including Caro Comes Out, which premiered on HBOMax after winning the Knight Made in MIA Award. In addition to his work as a director, he produced Crystal Kayiza’s Rest Stop, winner of the 2023 Short Film Jury Award for US Fiction at Sundance.

Noah and Brit co-directed most recently co-directed the hybrid documentary short, The Script, which premiered at CPH:DOX 2023.

With Time is a hybrid documentary film. Part archive building and part creative exercise, With Time starts in a simple black box theater in a community-based workshop focused on storytelling and dramatic writing. Over the course of five workshops, this group will brainstorm, develop, and revise stories of personal and historical significance, with the general prompt to explore an important moment in their understanding of their gender and/or queerness. Session by session, each workshop member will get closer to completing a script depicting the memory or moment of their choosing. The goal of this process is to infuse each script with subjectivity and give every person a chance to reckon with their own memories. From this workshop and with the support of a film crew, these narrativized memories will be turned into fully staged recreations.

Brit Fryer headshot: LaQuann Dawson (https://laquanndawson.com/) (right photo)

Noah Schamus headshot: Leah James (https://www.leahjamesart.com/) (left photo)

Naomi is a Korean American filmmaker. Her pilot, Nice, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She also co-founded an Asian female-identifying comedy group called Funny Asian Women Kollective. Naomi is a 2023 Sundance Women to Watch x Adobe Fellow, a Sundance Institute|The Asian American Foundation Fellow, a 2022 Sundance Episodic fellow, and a 2021–2022 Sundance Art of Practice fellow.

The 20-Year Curse is a dark comedy about Eunji, who is in a 20-year generational family curse. To break it, she embarks on a journey with her father, Hae Su, that spans both the material and spirit world.

Photo credit: Oscar Moreno

Reid Davenport makes documentaries about disability from an overtly political perspective. Reid’s film, I Didn’t See You There, won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards. It was also a Gotham Nominee for Best Documentary and won awards at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com described the film as “first-person poetry in captivating motion.” Vox called it a “must-see.” Life After, is being produced by Multitude Films and has received support from The Ford Foundation, Sundance, Field of Vision, and Catapult Film Fund. In 2020, Reid was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Filmmakers Under 40.” His short film, A Cerebral Game, won the Artistic Vision Award at the 2016 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

The starting point of Life After is the controversial 1980s case of Elizabeth Bouvia, who sued for the right to die because she was disabled and won—before assisted suicide was even legal for terminally ill patients. The film will uncover Bouvia’s life after she receded from public consciousness, up until she died in 2014. That same year, Jerika Bolen publicly planned to end her life with the help of her family because she was disabled. She was 14. In 2020, a doctor decided that Michael Hickson, who was being hospitalized with COVID-19, had “no quality of life” as a quadriplegic with brain damage, and removed Michael from a ventilator against his wife’s wishes. Claims of medical coercion and discrimination were dismissed in court. Life After will piece together the different ways that the legal and medical systems continue to aid and abet each other in making disabled death palpable.

Serena Violet Hodges is a documentary cinematographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Serena has worked on series including “30 for 30” (ESPN), “High on the Hog” (Netflix), “Asian Americans” (PBS), and provided cinematography for feature documentaries Food and Country (2023), Following Harry (2024), plus an upcoming Judy Chicago retrospective. Serena holds a B.A. in documentary production from DePaul University in Chicago and served as an intern for Kartemquin Films during their time in college—where their love of nonfiction storytelling flourished. They were a Visual Communications Armed with a Camera fellow in 2020. Their first fiction short, Mango Baby, premiered at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Islander Film Festival and Seattle Asian American Film Festival. It is available to watch on Alaska Airlines through March 2024.

Muncie Didu investigates the parallels of the legal and cultural dynamics of marriage between India and the United States. Upon discovering a buried and contentious divorce case within their family, a case that played a pivotal role in altering divorce law for women in India and the impetus of their family’s immigration to America, a filmmaker embarks on a documentary journey to delve deeper into the life of their great-aunt, Meera and her courageous defiance against the societal norms and expectations of her community that paved the way for her loved ones.

Alex Bijan Zandi is an Iranian-American filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work explores the social difficulties and enchantments of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Alex studied creative writing at the Washington University in St. Louis, where he received the Howard Nemerov Prize for Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Film/Video at Bard College. Alex was a 2022 Reykjavík Film Festival Talent Lab fellow and in 2021 participated in the MACRO x The Black List Feature Screenwriter Incubator. His films have been screened internationally at venues including the Amsterdam International Film Festival (Best Experimental Film Award), Brooklyn Film Festival, Abrons Art Center, Knockdown Center, Petzel Gallery, and 15 Orient Gallery.

As the protests for Mahsa Amini surge, Echoes of Pomegranate transforms an Iranian-American family’s bird-watching trip into a cosmic journey of revolutionary wonder. Converging Zandi’s familial history of the 1979 Iranian revolution with the present, the narrative short weaves digital with 8mm film and constructs a third space of archival re-enchantment. The dialectic between the young protesting protagonist, Shirin, and her scarred father, Abbas, generates a cinematic tapestry of the intergenerational conflict and trauma of the Iranian community. Entering fantastical archival film grain, they ultimately discover the redemption of their culture and homeland. Echoes of Pomegranate is for Mahsa Amini and all the brave ones. Women, Life, Freedom.

Photo Credit: Taylor Brophy

Yuko Torihara is a Tokyo-born, NYC-based actor, writer and filmmaker. She grew up between Japan, the UK, and the US. Performance and storytelling have been natural ways to make sense of her constantly changing environment. As a filmmaker, her projects have been supported by the Sundance Institute, The New Yorker Films, NYFA, NYSCA, and the Hot Docs Deal Maker. Her short documentary Chinatown Beat, about Chinatown legends crime novelist Henry Chang and photographer Corky Lee, was published in The New Yorker in March of 2021. As an actor, Yuko’s latest works include recurring roles on Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series “The Watcher” and Audible’s Podcast Series “The Space Within.” She trained with Anthony Abeson, Carl Ford (Susan Batson studio) and Jim Brill (Meisner Technique) in New York City as well as the Mugensha Theater Troupe in Tokyo.

A Revolutionary/Mother is a feature narrative film based on true incidents, told in live action and animation. At the height of Covid lockdown in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Yuko, a NYC-based millennial, undergoes a revolution of her own. She befriends Fusako Shigenobu, the former leader of the Japanese Red Army (JRA), serving a 21.5-year prison sentence in Japan. Yuko deep dives into the little-known Japanese history of global resistance as a way of making sense of her current reality. Fusako, a contentious feminist figure seen both as a hero and a terrorist, paved a singular path in Japan's global history. Meanwhile, Fusako’s daughter May encapsulates the shadow side of her mother’s actions. Part biopic and part coming of age story of 3 middle-aged women, A Revolutionary/Mother spans over 50 years across Tokyo, Beirut, and Covid-era New York City."

Diego Andres Murillo is a filmmaker born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Diego graduated from Audiovisual Arts at the Andrés Bello Catholic University and The Roberto Mata School of Photography. He left his constantly turmoiled native country in 2016 and unexpectedly settled in NYC, his current home. While adapting, he continues his DIY methods to create movies, which has led him, until this date, to the completion of 5 short films and one upcoming feature. The shorts have screened/won awards at international festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, SITGES Film Festival, Brussels Film Festival, Cinélatino de Toulouse, Uruguay Int. Film Festival, Curtas Cinema Río de Janeiro, Brooklyn FF, Tacoma FF, Beijing Int. SFF, and many more. He’s been part of programs such as the Locarno Spring Academy, Cine Qua Non-Lab, and others. He is the co-founder of Maldito Fantasma (Damn Phantom), a production company spread between Caracas, Buenos Aires and NYC.

El Sonido Es El Cuerpo (Sound Is The Body) follows the wanderings of a laborless priest in a decaying Venezuelan town where animals and people just leave or disappear, and a few remaining authorities hoard over the remnants that occupy half-empty neon-lit bars. As he suffers from a somnambulist-noise condition that makes him stray naked, bleed, and forget certain events, he now faces the possible seizing of his only precious possession, a meek cow. As he tries to safekeep the animal, his sleepwalking encounters get louder and more alien-like, and a re-encounter with an old friend who is interested in helping him brings to the surface repressed desires. The film creates a moving space, shifting between dreams, memories, and the quotidian to explore an intimate crisis of faith, one that can perhaps serve as a radiography of a territory in constant distress.