Participant Archive

2026 Participants
  • LITTLE BUDDY

    Writer/Director: Nicole Emanuele
    Writer: Beth Hoyt
    After a last attempt in a long fertility journey fails, Maggie and Jason head to the family cottage to reconnect and move on. Instead, Maggie finds herself mothering a cute delivery robot she impulsively stole from the local country store.

     

    MINNESOTA GOODBYE - Pitch Winner

    Writer/Director: Sid Gopinath
    Writer: Aditya Joshi
    Four generations of an Indian immigrant family navigate love, loss, and belonging while building a home for themselves at a lakeside cabin in Northern Minnesota. An intimate family epic told in reverse chronological order.

     

    THE PLAYGROUND

    Writer/Director: Rachel Harrison-Gordon
    A burned-out mother and former one-hit-wonder enters a surreal international lullaby competition hoping to reclaim the creative life she abandoned, but when her neurodivergent son begins struggling within the systems meant to support him, she learns to honor his experience of the world, and rediscovers her own voice in the process.

     

    SHANGHAI NO. 1 SEAFOOD PALACE

    Writer: Erica Liu
    Director: Jean Lee
    Eleanor is invited to join a group of friends from Singapore, now in their late sixties, as they gather at a Chinese restaurant for a series of annual reunion dinners. When they begin dying one by one, Eleanor grows suspicious, as strange incidents and unsettling revelations make her question what’s truly happening at the table.

     

    THERE IS NO PLACE

    Writer/Director: Jesus Beltran
    When Juan - a self-taught tech worker on the verge of landing a full-time offer - gets a call that his older brother Junior is released from prison, he drives 400 miles to haul him home down the Northern California coast. What starts as an obligation becomes something neither of them expected: a darkly comic and bittersweet collision between two men shaped by a world built for neither of them.

     

2025 Participants
  • FIGHT LIKE A MOTHER

    Writer/Director: Meagan Noel Fulps
    On the brink of her final Olympic run, elite boxer Willa Wiley unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Determined to do it all, she embarks on a postpartum comeback while shouldering a festering secret—one that threatens her closest relationships and forces her to confront her narrow perception of motherhood.

     

    IVAN

    Writer/Director: Jazz Pitcairn
    As Hurricane Ivan barrels towards the coast of Grand Cayman, Mia Clark-Thompson fights to maintain her lead in the upcoming election for parliament, when a formidable political challenger joins the race... her father. Inspired by true events.

     

    TAKE ME HOME - Pitch Winner

    Writer/Director: Liz Sargent
    Anna cares for her aging parents in a fragile balance of meeting one another’s needs. When a Florida heat wave shatters their family and Anna’s routine, her future is uncertain until she creates a world where she can thrive.

     

    UN LUGAR DE AGUA

    Writer/Director: Orlando Javier Torres
    In 1996, a desperate young factory worker vanishes at sea after a botched robbery in a small Puerto Rican town. Twelve years later, a single mother must decide what to believe when a mysterious castaway emerges from the same waters with echoes of her lost first love.

     

    ALLEY OF THE TALL GRASS

    Writer/Director: Masami Kawai
    When a TV/VCR combo set is thrown out, it unexpectedly survives and circulates through an Oregon town. In this intersecting tapestry of Indigenous characters, rambunctious sisters, struggling artists, a metal scrapper, and his skater daughter all find connection through this seemingly obsolete object.

     

2024 Participants
  • FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

    Carmen Corral (Screenwriter)
    Aubrey Campbell, Producer
    For generations, the De Leon women have been cursed in love, resulting in one heartbreak after another. When the youngest daughter, Espe, gets engaged to a man they barely know, her mother, Gloria, enlists the help of every prima, tia and abuela to break up the engagement before history inevitably repeats itself.

     

    HONEYJOON - Pitch Winner

    Lilian T. Mehrel (Writer/Director)
    Kurdish-Persian mother Lela and her diaspora daughter June take a trip to the romantic Azores off the Portuguese coast, after a recent loss. Out of place amidst honeymooners in paradise, they attempt to reclaim their lust for living. But life – and each other – keeps getting in their way.

     

    IN AN ORDERLY FASHION

    Adrian Cardenas (Writer/Director)
    In the peaceful suburbs of Miami, a Cuban family’s lives are upended when Rafa, after forty years of hard work, is rewarded with a terminal illness on the first day of his retirement. Chaos ensues when Rafa asks the unthinkable from his wife: to help him end it all, so long as he doesn’t know when it’s coming.

     

    SHOOTS

    Kanani Koster (Writer/Director)
    When Jasmine, a floundering high school senior, gets her hands on a bag of stolen marijuana before graduation, she ropes in her level-headed best friend, Nainoa, on a late-night odyssey across Maui to make some quick cash for a dream apartment. Dodging drug dealers, overbearing aunties, and past lovers, the two grapple with the oncoming changes to their lives and the island they call home.

     

    SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIDE

    Julia Morizawa (Screenwriter)
    Desdemona Chiang (Director)
    Jen, a misanthropic single mother and recovering addict, is confronted with her dying mother's confession: the existence of a long-lost baby given up for adoption back in Japan. When Jen tracks down her seemingly perfect half-brother, her insecurities run rampant as she attempts to fulfill her mother’s final wish – bring the other child home before it’s too late.

2023 Participants
  • ANGEL IN RETROGRADE

    Miguel Angel Caballero (Writer/Director)
    Luis Antonio Aldana (Writer)
    After a car accident, Angel awakens from a coma with retrograde amnesia, unaware of the last twenty years. As he attempts to adapt to a middle-aged life with a wife and a teenage daughter, Angel unexpectedly reignites his attraction with his high school best friend, Joshua.

     

    BAT MITZVAH

    Selyna Warren and Marissa Read (Writer/Director)
    Babe Brenner, broke and stumbling through early adulthood, makes a wager with her Bubi to advance her inheritance by getting Bat Mitzvah’ed by her 30th. Forced to attend Hebrew school with a bunch of hormonal twelve-year-olds, her new tween-age besties teach Babe the real meaning of becoming a woman.

     

    BODY SHOP

    Maria Mealla (Writer/Director)
    In an alternate reality where “body shops” replace hospitals, Lupe’s body suffers an accident that forces her into the loaner frame of a white Anglo woman. Desperate to expedite the repairs, Lupe ventures to a rumored black market to source skin that matches her true identity.

     

    COLOR BOOK - Pitch Winner

    David Fortune (Writer/Director)
    Following the passing of his wife, a devoted father is learning to raise his son with Down Syndrome as a single parent. While adjusting to their new reality, the two embark on a journey through Metro Atlanta to attend their first baseball game.

     

    HYPER/SPACE

    Moon Molson (Writer/Director)
    An urban Black Millennial, suffering from a bundle of unnamed neurological disorders, is launched into a low-key manic quest to unravel the mystery of his mother’s death after his live-in girlfriend ‘disappears’.

2022 Participants
  • MUTT

    Vuk Lungulov-Klotz (Writer/Director)
    Over the course of a single hectic day in New York City, three people from Feña's past are thrust back into his life. Having lost touch since transitioning from female to male, Feña must navigate the new dynamics of these old relationships while tackling the day-to-day challenges that come with living a life in-between.

     

    PAPER TRAIL

    Rachael Moton (Writer/Director)
    In rapidly gentrifying North Philadelphia, two genius Black siblings at risk of eviction begin doing the coursework of local college students in exchange for cash. When one of their clients, a white woman, goes viral from an essay they wrote the siblings are faced with a moral dilemma: allow their client to publicly use their voices, or be caught at the center of a cheating scandal.

     

    SMOKING TIGERS – Pitch Winner

    So Young Shelly Yo (Writer/Director)
    Set in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, Smoking Tigers is a portrait of a lonely 16-year-old Korean American girl named Hayoung who is taken under the wings of three wealthy students she meets at an elite academic boot-camp. As she falls deeper into their world, Hayoung works harder to hide her problematic family and lower-income background from her new friends, only to discover the bittersweet pains of adulthood that will forever shape her life.

     

    THE WEIGHT OF LAND

    Daniel Drummond (Writer/Director)
    When the Estradas, a family of Latino ranch hands, learn they’ve inherited one of the largest ranches in Arizona the promise of a better future seems certain. However, bitter feuds spurred by the inheritance drive a dangerous wedge between the Estradas and their small town.

     

    UNDER THE LIGHTS

    Miles Levin (Writer/Director)
    A boy with epilepsy, desperate to feel like a regular kid, goes to prom knowing that the lights will make him have a seizure.

2021 Participants
  • HOMEGOING

    Carlton Daniel Jr. (Writer/Director)
    Haunted by nightmares, musical prodigy, Junior Carmichael, returns home to his family’s funeral parlor in Cleveland, Ohio in order to salvage his grip on reality. While finding his place in the world, he must come to terms with his family, community, and the man he loves.

     

    JOHNNY LOVES DOLORES

    Clarissa de los Reyes (Writer/Director)
    As a community in Queens struggles to keep afloat during the 2008 recession, a lonely, underpaid clerk considers a lucrative “green card marriage” that runs counter to his ideal of marrying for love. His plans are complicated when an undocumented immigrant he secretly adores finds herself in dire financial need.

     

    LAND OF GOLD - Pitch Winner

    Nardeep Khurmi (Writer/Director)
    First-generation Punjabi truck driver Kiran is about to become a father, but his irresponsibility is alienating everyone close to him. When he hears pounding on a shipping container at work and discovers an undocumented girl named Elena inside, everything changes as he sets out on a cross-country road-trip in search of her family. Over the arduous journey, the pair evade the police while feuding and bonding over music, paint swatches, and what it means to be seen as “other” in white America.

     

    LECHE

    Gabriella A. Moses (Writer/Director)
    Nina, a 9-year-old Dominican girl with albinism, is still grieving the death of her abuela when she moves to the States to live with her estranged mother. In a misguided attempt to cope and assimilate, she manifests the vodou spirits from her abuela’s altar and discovers they’re more than she bargained for when death begins to follow her.

     

    NEON TILAPIA

    Tony Koros (Writer/Director)
    When a dangerous water-weed threatens to take over his lake and livelihood, a fisherman in rural Kenya forms an unexpected alliance with his estranged granddaughter to fight back using glowing, genetically modified fish. As strange lights appear in the lake, chaos erupts in the village, and the two are challenged to reach a new understanding of each other.

2019 Participants
  • AFLOAT

    Aslihan Unaldi (Writer/Director)
    Before he is thrown in prison for exposing government corruption in his latest book, Turkish journalist Yusuf convinces his ex-wife and adult daughters to reunite for a sailing trip on the Aegean coast. As soon as they leave the marina, tensions rise, old resentments surface and new secrets are revealed.

     

    EXPATRIATES

    Kaliya Warren (Writer/Director)
    An adventurous biracial American woman is on a travel photography project in East Africa, when she falls for a playboy volunteer doctor on assignment in Ethiopia. Together, they embark on a life-altering motorcycle road trip from Sudan to South Africa. EXPATRIATES explores the West's relationship with contemporary East Africa and Neocolonialism in the Millennial age.

     

    MARVELOUS AND THE BLACK HOLE – Pitch Winner

    Kate Tsang (Writer/Director)
    Teenage delinquent Sammy Ko teams up with a surly children's party magician on a bizarre adventure to navigate her tumultuous home life and inner demons. A coming-of-age comedy that touches on unlikely friendships, grief, and finding hope in the darkest moments.

     

    WASHING ELENA

    Maria Victoria Ponce (Writer/Director)
    Set in Richmond, California, WASHING ELENA follows 31-year-old Indalia's struggle to solve the mystery surrounding her best friend Elena’s sudden death. To find answers, Indalia must confront the realities of Elena's surprising conversion to Islam, leading Indalia to challenge her own biases, vices and lingering guilt.

     

    ZENITH

    Ellie Foumbi (Writer/Director)
    Carolyn Mao, Producer
    An adopted Black Mennonite woman leaves the rural white community she was raised in and travels to an inner-city neighborhood in Philadelphia to find her biological mother. ZENITH explores how we choose to construct our identities through race, faith and family.

2018 Participants
  • EMMETT

    Bridget Stokes (Writer/Director)
    Vicky Wight (Writer)
    Emmett is a genius when it comes to school, but when it comes to coping with the emotional ins and outs of adolescence, he needs his friends both old and new, to help him confront his enemies both real and imagined.

     

    LUCKY GRANDMA - Pitch Winner

    Sasie Sealy (Writer/Director)
    Banban Cheng (Writer)
    Set in New York City’s Chinatown, the film follows an ornery, chain-smoking Chinese grandma who goes all in at the casino, landing herself on the wrong side of luck… and in the middle of a gang war.

     

    THE BEAUTIFUL ONES

    Neil M. Paik (Writer/Director)
    The lives of young Americans of differing backgrounds interconnect by way of an old Polaroid camera that changes hands from Los Angeles to Afghanistan and back, capturing moments of love, loss, and searching through the two decades following 9/11.

     

    THE YEAR BETWEEN

    Alex Heller (Writer/Director)
    During the year between Clemence's earth-shattering diagnosis of bipolar disorder and her earth-shattering comeback, she attempts to rejoin society from her room in her parents' basement.

     

    YOU AND ME BOTH

    Jennifer Suhr (Writer/Director)
    Two sisters, one a struggling heroin addict fresh from rehab, take a road trip through America's Heartland to meet their Korean birth mother after their adoptive mother's passing. Along the way they must navigate feelings of grief and fear in order to find their way back to one another.

2017 Participants
  • FOREVER EVEN LONGER

    Andres Perez-Duarte (Writer/Director)
    After the death of his estranged gay son, an elderly man from a small town in Mexico travels to the U.S. to meet his heartbroken granddaughter and his resentful son-in-law — and confront his own prejudice.

     

    THE HAND OF GOD

    Lissette Feliciano (Writer/Director)
    Elon Edson is the greatest footballer in the world. On the eve of receiving a lifetime achievement award, he recounts his belief in miracles that carried him from his mother’s death at the hands of terrorists through his perilous escape from Nigeria to Europe.

     

    I’M NOT DOWN

    A. Sayeeda Moreno (Writer/Director)
    When a middleage, black punk-rock single dad is served an eviction notice by the greedy new landlord of his New York City tenement, he has to fight for his way of life and save the livelihood of his family, the building’s residents, and the character of his East Village neighborhood that’s in danger of vanishing forever.

     

    NIGERIAN PRINCE - Pitch Winner

    Faraday Okoro (Writer/Director)
    A troubled American teenager, sent away to his mother's native Nigeria, finds himself entangled in a dangerous web of scams and corruption with a con-artist cousin as his guide.

     

    THE SHORT HISTORY OF THE LONG ROAD

    Ani Simon-Kennedy (Writer/Director)
    Nola grew up living out of a van with her charismatic father, Clint. When her dad suddenly dies, the teenager must confront the reality of a nomadic life on the road alone — and learn to own her grief, her past, and her new destination.