Paul Papacalos was set to marry Judy Bourgeois in 1993. They were building their dream house and hoped to have a baby. Then Paul suffered a massive stroke that left him locked inside his body, unable to speak or move.
Judy knew Paul was still there. Looking into his eyes, she just knew. She developed a system of blinking, eyebrow movements, and letters that allowed Paul to communicate. Soon they were having conversations again—but no longer about the life they had planned.
Paul had been an extraordinary athlete who skied Tuckerman Ravine, cycled, and climbed mountains. Unable to accept life permanently trapped inside an unresponsive body, he made the decision to refuse nutrition and hydration. His family, holding onto hope for recovery, opposed his wishes. Heartbroken but resolute, Judy stood by Paul’s decision.
Paul petitioned the court to establish that he was competent to make that decision. Attorney Carol Erskine was appointed his guardian ad litem, and attorney Geoffrey Spofford represented Paul. But something unexpected happened as they prepared for the hearing: Paul became more than a case. Carol and Geoff developed a deep friendship with him and Judy, coming to know Paul’s intelligence, humor, and extraordinary determination.
On November 7, 1993, Paul’s hospital room became a courtroom. Dressed in civilian clothes at his insistence, Paul communicated through his eyes while Carol translated his signals into words for the judge. His request was unwavering: “No nutrition and hydration.”
Asked what would happen if he refused food and water, Paul answered:
D-E-A-T-H.
More than thirty years after Paul died, we return with Judy to Tuckerman Ravine and to the life she and Paul once imagined together. Judy never married. Paul was the love of her life.
Through intimate interviews, cinéma vérité and archival materials, In Paul’s Eyes tells the story of Paul and Judy’s extraordinary love, Paul’s fight to be heard, and the friendships forged around an alphabet board that have endured for more than three decades. It explores love, loss, autonomy, and human dignity—and asks how one man’s determination can continue to influence medicine, law, and the people whose lives he changed.
DJANGO JAZZ is a feature-length documentary celebrating the life, music and enduring influence of Django Reinhardt, one of the most original musicians in the history of jazz. It is also a journey through Paris, the city where Django came of age and where jazz found an extraordinary second home. The film traces Django’s Romani roots and early career alongside the arrival of jazz in Paris, brought in part by African American musicians who found enthusiastic audiences in France. After a devastating fire permanently damaged his left hand, Django reinvented his guitar technique and went on to help form the Quintette du Hot Club de France with violinist Stéphane Grappelli, creating a distinctive European jazz sound that brought him international fame.
The film follows Django through the dramatic upheavals of the 1930s and ’40s: the flowering of Paris jazz culture, the dangers and contradictions of life as a Romani musician during the German Occupation, and his remarkable postwar journey to America as a featured soloist with Duke Ellington. Rather than remaining tied to the celebrated Hot Club sound, Django continued to evolve. His encounter with American jazz and bebop drew him toward electric guitar and a more modern musical language, heard in his postwar recordings in Paris and Rome and in the strikingly contemporary music of his final years. Along the way, DJANGO JAZZ explores the colorful mythology surrounding Django while revealing a more complex artist—curious, restless and continually searching for the next sound.
Moving between archival history and present-day Paris, DJANGO JAZZ brings Django’s world to life through photographs, films, recordings and the streets and neighborhoods where the story unfolded. Leading writers and scholars provide historical context, while contemporary musicians—including Duved Dunayevsky and the New Quintette du Hot Club de France, Brad Brose, Shola Adisa-Farrar, Tatiana Eva-Marie, Opus Quatre and Django’s great-grandson, guitarist Simba Baumgartner—show how vibrantly his music lives on. Part musical biography, part cultural history and part affectionate visit to Paris, DJANGO JAZZ celebrates an artist who transformed the music he inherited and created a sound that continues to travel around the world.
Adapted from the short story by Ernest White II and inspired by true events, Pull is an unconventional love story between two gay men pulled in different directions by professional obligations, family ties, cultural and societal expectations, and the desires of their hearts. Unfulfilled in their current lives in Ottawa, pediatric surgeon Eric Nair and blue collar, would-be novelist Antonio Woods lock eyes at a coffee shop, both instantly unnerved and afraid to speak to the other. From that day forward, the two men begin to feel strange sensations in their chests and become obsessed with thoughts of each other. They dream of each other and see aspects of each other in themselves as their lives transform, guided by signs and synchronicities. Ultimately, they’ll need to follow that energetic pull to reunite.
Why Pull Matters:
“Every human being needs to know that they are not only capable of love, but worthy of it. Pull is a dreamscape of possibility, of passion, of love between two men who have only ever settled for what they thought they were worth. Pull captures the moment a connection becomes a catalyst for profound personal evolution, shifting from a mere encounter into a force that demands we become our truest selves. It is a tribute to the kind of love that empowers us to break old patterns and finally embrace the expansive, joyful life we’ve always been afraid to step into. Successful films like Moonlight and Red, White & Royal Blue, plus series like Heated Rivalry show that modern audiences cheer for original stories featuring two men in love, joining Past Lives, Serendipity, and the
Before… trilogy among the enduring films about the power of destiny. Pull embodies the light between lovers that everyone deserves to experience. Surrender to the pull.”
—Kim Fields, Executive Producer
Pull
90-minute romance/drama feature film
Director: Anthony Q. Farrell
Producers: Kim Fields, Anthony Q. Farrell, Art Rutter, and Ernest White II
Production Companies: Presidio Pictures, K-Lab, and Neighbourhood Watch
On December 26, 2020, a decorated Green Beret entered a bowling alley in Rockford, Illinois and opened fire — killing three people and injuring three others. His name is Duke Webb. He does not deny what he did. The question is why.
After four deployments to Afghanistan, and three to Latin America, Duke Webb returned home a different and damaged man. He had sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) during his service and developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). By late 2020, his mental health had deteriorated significantly.
The Army prescribed Webb Memantine, a powerful neurological drug typically used to treat Alzheimer’s disease, known to carry significant potential side effects including hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions.
Weeks later, on December 26, 2020, Webb entered the Don Carter Lanes bowling alley and opened fire, believing those around him were “the enemy.” Three people died; three others were seriously injured. The entire attack was captured on surveillance video and devastated the Rockford community.
Webb does not deny the shootings. His defense has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of involuntary intoxication, arguing that the combination of TBI, PTSD, and Army-prescribed medication triggered a catastrophic psychotic break that left him unable to control his actions. Prosecutors contend he acted knowingly and must be held fully accountable — a sentence of life without parole. As Webb awaits trial in 2026-2027, his case sits at the unresolved intersection of combat trauma, military medicine, and criminal justice.
When Israeli filmmaker Ayala Sharot’s young son begins having recurring nightmares, she sets out to understand where his fear comes from. What begins as a mother’s attempt to comfort her child becomes a journey across four generations of one family, tracing how fear, memory, and history pass from mother to child.
The search first brings Ayala to her father, Danny, a child psychologist who was raised in a 1950s kibbutz children’s house, when children slept apart from their parents in the name of collective ideals. It then leads her to Miriam, her grandmother, a Jewish girl from Detroit who fell in love with the Zionist dream and left America to build a life in Israel.
Decades later, Ayala is raising her own child in the country Miriam chose. Through intimate family encounters, archival traces, and dreamlike hand-drawn animation, the film moves between past and present, between Israel and America, and between the private world of motherhood and the larger dreams that shaped Jewish families on both sides of the ocean. As the story unfolds, the film brings forward the women’s side of that history, and the choices and silences that shaped the family across generations.
At its heart, A Mother’s Land is a personal film about motherhood, inheritance, and the fragile bond between the American Jewish dream of Israel and the reality of raising a child there today. Through one family’s story, it opens a larger conversation about fear, belonging, and the price of calling a place home.
Presented by Vision Beyond Vision Production Company LLC, The Boston Street Universe is an ambitious, interconnected five-series saga chronicling fifty years of Boston’s untold history. Adapted from the bestselling urban novels by author Myster Solomon, this cinematic universe stretches from the city’s iconic brick project walls to the cutthroat boardrooms of billion-dollar enterprises, delivering a powerhouse of authentic East Coast storytelling that Hollywood has yet to truly capture.
The saga features a deeply woven tapestry of crime, passion, and loyalty across five distinct series:
- Under the Brim: A gritty 1980s period drama tracking a charismatic leader transforming a street hustle into a media empire amidst a historic neighborhood conflict.
- Impulsive Love: Set in the fortress of Boston’s Columbia Point Projects, tracking an aspiring mogul and his partner as they spiral into a volatile cycle of obsession, betrayal, and street justice.
- First Ladies of Boston: A twenty-year look into the rise of an elite female crime family navigating the deadly crossroads of motherhood, street survival, and police corruption.
- The Roxbury Oath: A high-stakes culmination pitting a powerful syndicate against a ruthless, rogue police unit where the lines of loyalty and law enforcement are completely erased.
- Shadow of Alliance: A gripping look at the secret pacts, backroom deals, and hidden loyalties shifting the balance of power across the city’s changing landscape.
Meticulously crafted for the modern binge-watching era, The Boston Street Universe grounds itself in raw authenticity. Beyond creating premium, gripping media, this project acts as a vital community platform—utilizing its live-set production environments to train and employ local youth and aspiring creative technicians from the Boston and Brockton communities. Your tax-deductible donation directly funds our physical pre-production, script bibles, casting, and the development of local workforce talent.
Long before a technology reshapes everyday life, societies begin to imagine it. Before artificial intelligence entered our workplaces, before algorithms began curating what we see and believe, before the question of who controls the machines became one of the defining political questions of our time, science fiction was already rehearsing the answers.
Imagining Tomorrow is a feature-length documentary that examines over seventy years of science fiction film and television as something more than entertainment. It asks a question that feels newly urgent: if societies rehearse the future through stories, what do those stories reveal about what we feared, what we hoped for, and who we believed would be left holding the controls?
The film traces how speculative storytelling has tracked the great anxieties of each era. In the 1950s, the fear was nuclear annihilation and the loss of individual identity to faceless conformity. By the 1970s and 1980s, technology had begun to feel less like a tool and more like a system with a will of its own. In the 1990s, stories about conspiracy, surveillance, and the unreliability of reality itself reflected a growing suspicion that the institutions organizing modern life had grown too complex to understand and too powerful to challenge.
As the century turned, Y2K briefly made the machinery of modern civilization itself the villain, and when the clocks rolled over without catastrophe, the relief was short-lived. After September 11, the nostalgia that had softened earlier science fiction gave way to something harder: stories about survival, moral compromise, and imagining life inside the apocalypse rather than before it. Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, and Children of Men were not warnings about the future. They were reckonings with a present that already felt broken. By the late 2000s and into the 2010s, a quieter shift was underway. The genre increasingly turned toward questions of meaning, belief, memory, and what survives catastrophe when science alone cannot explain the human need for hope.
Today something new is underway. As artificial intelligence reshapes communication, labor, creativity, and knowledge itself, speculative stories are asking not whether new technologies will work, but who will govern them, who will benefit, and what happens to everyone else. Contemporary science fiction is less concerned with the robot uprising than with something quieter and more unsettling: the gradual transfer of authorship, judgment, and power to systems no single person controls and few fully understand. The fear is not that the machines will turn on us. It is that we will hand them the keys willingly, and only later think to ask whose interests they were built to serve.
Imagining Tomorrow draws on a research database of more than 1,300 science fiction films and television series produced since 1950 to investigate whether these shifts represent a pattern, and what that pattern might tell us about the present moment. The film brings together historians, media scholars, philosophers, and cultural critics to explore how speculative storytelling has served as one of humanity’s most enduring ways of confronting what it cannot yet name.
Imagining Tomorrow is being developed by Charles River Media, Inc. with guidance from a humanities advisory board of scholars, historians, and cultural critics.
THE GRIND is one of the world’s first ever scripted vertical sitcoms. When it comes to vertical short-form, specifically the world of ReelShort and other such platforms, the unfortunate reality is that this content is exploitative and often misogynistic, promoting manipulation and excess. We want to bring goodness into this space – with an uplifting story, smart writing, and the nostalgia of cozy sitcoms. THE GRIND is female-led, female-written, female-directed, and female-produced, featuring a diverse cast and multi-abled actors. Our season will have 45-50 episodes, each about 1-5min in length, designed to be watched entirely on your phone.
A barista with nothing to lose and a coffee shop that won’t let her.
An ensemble comedy set behind the counter of a busy Atlanta coffee shop, the kind of place where the regulars have a usual, the staff has a group chat, and every shift hides a small disaster waiting to happen.
Through mishaps, late shifts, bad customers, and the steady highs and lows of being twenty-something and broke, the employees discover that the people you clock in with can start to feel an awful lot like family.
Co-Directed by Ollie Yao and Olivia Porretta
We’ve all been on that harrowing sprint— perhaps one too many coffees taking their toll as your mind starts racing, eyes darting around for any sign of relief. This is a feeling all too familiar for New Yorkers, a city where there is only 1 public restroom for every 8,500 residents. As Mayor Mamdani said: “Everyone knows the feeling of needing a bathroom and not being able to find one.” This film, I Need to Pee! aims to bring that issue to life as an animated comedy. It’s about a real New York problem — told through the eyes of a Brooklynite who just really, really needs to find a bathroom.
This is a film that punches back at the maddening state of the world today. It’s an aggressively handmade, clear-cut comedy that highlights one of the most important fixtures of the modern world. When you’re cast out onto the streets of an unforgiving city, a toilet is more than just a plumbing fixture— it’s a beautiful porcelain companion. When loved ones fail you, you know a toilet will always be there to help you through your most vulnerable moments.
This film has been my own story more times than I’d like to admit — I’m a former New Yorker with a notoriously small bladder, and the frantic search for a bathroom is one I know intimately. As an animator, making a film about it felt like the only reasonable response. Our team is led by industry professionals, with experience at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, and Paramount, committed to doing this story justice with a high level of visual quality. Our production ahead is clear, armed with a stellar script, strong visual development, and a full animatic, we aim to enter production with a straightforward roadmap for the journey in front of us.
All that said, this project doesn’t come to life without you. At its heart, this is a small, weird, deeply human story — the kind that rarely gets made anymore. Your support is what proves that it should. Thank you very much for your contribution.
History on the Road is an immersive television series concept created by Daniel Tobias Flint that brings American history to life by connecting national events to the local communities where they unfolded. Through engaging storytelling, on-location experiences, and collaboration with students, historians, and local residents, the series transforms traditional history education into an interactive journey across the United States. Each episode highlights how ordinary communities helped shape the broader American story, creating a meaningful connection between the past and present.
Produced by Amelio Media and led by award-winning documentarian Nicole Amelio-Casper, M.A., the project combines cinematic storytelling with educational outreach and community engagement. Rather than focusing solely on mainstream historical narratives, History on the Road explores the overlooked stories, hidden landmarks, and powerful local histories that helped define America. The series will examine subjects ranging from immigrant communities and industrial movements to Native American heritage and military history, bringing audiences face-to-face with the people and places that shaped the nation. Through reenactments, interviews, and immersive on-location filming, the series inspires viewers to see history not as distant events in textbooks, but as living stories rooted in communities across the country.
The first pilot episode, projected at a production cost of $220,000, will be filmed in historic downtown Philadelphia and surrounding areas rich with untold American history. The episode will explore Philadelphia’s deep Revolutionary War roots, hidden military history, immigrant influences, and the city’s role in shaping the foundation of the United States. By partnering with local schools, historians, museums, and community organizations, the pilot will create an authentic and educational viewing experience while serving as the foundation for the larger multi-year series. History on the Road aims to become both an engaging television series and a lasting educational resource that reconnects audiences nationwide with America’s shared history.
