Bash Town – is a stunningly powerful original full-length feature film drama about overcoming challenges and taking a stand to uplift your entire community. Sebastian Townsend is a Black male teenager at an urban public school. He’s not in a gang and doesn’t deal drugs – but he and his friends face many poverty-induced challenges that sometimes put them in precarious situations.
Throughout the film we see Sebastian overcome hardships and evolve as a rising leader. Along the way he is inspired by his parents, an engaging history teacher, a radio news anchor, a Jewish Holocaust Survivor, the descendent of an enslaved man, and a local politician. All these factors point the way for Sebastian to launch a campaign to run for City Council.
At the same time Sebastian experiences the complications around high school and the drama of teen romance.
Bash Town is a unique story that presents a Black teenager striving to better himself and a diverse population by advocating for educational equality and refusing to give-up when life throws up impossible odds. It’s a film that will inspire all demographics and lead the audience to cheer out loud as they see Sebastian persevere.
The team behind Bash Town consists of a diverse group of highly experienced producers who have worked on Academy Award winning films, successful documentaries, and popular TV programs. The producers have also worked with inspiring teens who overcome a lack of resources in their community on a daily basis. We have also produced content regarding Holocaust Survivors.
Currently Bash Town has secured $1.5-million in private investments (including our own) but seek an additional $1.3-million in order to produce Bash Town with a noteworthy cast and high-level production values. Bash Town is the story that is needed in this period in time – and we seek your help in producing it such that it gets a wide audience that can motivate positive change.
WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN YOU LOOK AT AN OLDER PERSON?
DO YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO’S BEST DAYS ARE BEHIND THEM?
SOMEONE WITH LITTLE TO OFFER?
These universal questions are the heartbeat of this film. The answers are powerful and poignant.
Film Focus:
A FORCE FOR GOOD, set against the back drop of the City of Newburyport Senior Community Center, is an 80 minute feature documentary that celebrates those seniors who choose to be a vibrant force for good in their elder years.
Film Subjects:
Throughout our documentary we provide our audiences an intimate lens into the lives of a remarkable collection of extraordinary people whose mere presence has the potential to inspire and enhance each life they touch.
Film Themes:
Through intimate stories our film celebrates the human experience and the enduring power of optimism while exploring the importance of resilience, adapting to change and redefining our purpose in the later stages of life.
Film Status:
Revising the Director’s cut and spotting the music.
Film Production:
A FORCE FOR GOOD is a documentary written and directed by three-time nominated and Prime Time Emmy Award winning producer, photographer, writer, journalist and Italian-born documentarian Lorenzo Minoli.
Produced by: Cathryn Minoli
Co-Producer and Edited by: Jeffrey Vacirca
Associate Producers: Mary Kelly and Geordie Vining
Director of Photography: Michael Rossi
Music by Carlo SilioNo
Consul.ng Producer: Gordon Przybyla
Writer and Voiceovers: Sofia Minoli
Film Release:
The film premieres at The Screening Room Theater in Newburyport, MA on June 29, 2026
For most of its history, the Romani commune of Zmaljevo was a peaceful residential area. As the Chinese-owned Zijin Mining Company has expanded and begun mining directly behind, life in these footholds has become significantly worse. Now, after a recent purchase of the land on which they live on by Zijin, the Romani await as resettlement hangs over their heads. In the shadow of all of this, we follow a variety of personal stories: Romani boxers, patriarchs, schoolgirls, and the Chinese workers who have come to settle in around this community.
On July 9 1391, nearly all the Jews in Valencia, Spain were massacred, abruptly ending 1300 years of vibrant Jewish life and community in this area. On July 4, 2025—nearly 634 years later to the day—a nascent Reform Jewish community in Valencia was gifted its first Torah from a sister congregation in Connecticut. Threaded traces the journey of this 100-year-old scroll from its pre-war roots in southern Poland to its longtime residence in several congregations in the northeastern U.S., to its current home in Spain, where Judaism is, half a millennium after the Inquisition, newly ascendant once more. Through the movement of this Torah, we also see mirrored, the vibrancy and resilience of the myriad Jewish communities that have treasured it, as well as the endless capacity for spiritual connection and religious rebirth that marks the story of Judaism the world over.
In a country with a long history of expulsion and violence against Jews, this community is nonetheless marked by rebirth, resilience, and the power of human connection in ways that transcend the current hatred and polarization. The story of the Jews is one of perpetual rebirth, reimagination, and survival. This timely film serves to showcase a vibrant example of these themes in our present, fraught moment.
South Africa: Four Journeys. One Mirror. Identities Shattered.
Ubuntu Rising is a documentary that follows four young Black Americans: an aerospace engineer, a public health scholar, a pastor, and a tech entrepreneur. Together they travel to South Africa, almost 30 years after apartheid. What begins as an exploration of another country’s history quickly becomes a mirror, forcing the team to confront their own questions about race, identity, and inequality in the United States.
As the journey unfolds, the team uncovers striking parallels between apartheid’s aftermath and America’s present. Wealth inequality refuses to die, systems of racism reinvent themselves, and unresolved questions of opportunity and responsibility surface. These realizations ignite heated debates and tense conflicts as the team clashes over topics ranging from reparations and personal responsibility to capitalism and the different paths toward change.
The team set out searching for answers to America’s toughest questions but instead found themselves wrestling with their own beliefs. What follows is an emotional rollercoaster of raw conversations, clashing worldviews, and revelations that grip both the team and the audience, daring viewers to question their own assumptions.
Her Inherent Belonging is a character-driven non-fiction film exploring how craft as a practice connects humans to place, their ancestral past and the present moment. Craft offers a holistic experience often lacking in our digitally-dominated modern world. Working with one’s hands harmonizes the whole human: unifying intellect, heart and hand. Remembering our inherent wholeness reminds us of belonging to (or interdependence with) each other and the natural world. When we are rooted in this feeling of belonging, we are more able to contribute to creating a reality that serves the whole.
By following the lives of Finnish craftswomen from the quiet darkness of Finland’s long winter into the midnight sun of summer, Her Inherent Belonging will transport audiences into the intimacy of their studios and their home forests to explore how their craft connects them to who they are. Thoughtful, cinematic, and rooted in character, Her Inherent Belonging is an ode to the interconnection between people, craft and place – a way of being eloquently embodied in Finland.
The project consists of a 48-minute film, four short profile videos of Finnish craftswomen for exhibition and screenings in both Finland and the United States in late 2026.
Production Status & Contact
As of July 2025, we have completed production and have moved into Post-Production. We are seeking support for Post-Production and Outreach expenses allowing Madison to produce and edit the films to completion as well as for the collaborations with Helsinki-based music composer Aino Juutilainen for an original music score and sound design and Zefferin Llamas for illustrations and animations for the film.
We are also looking for a sales agent, promotional and screening partners and open to collaboration on all fronts. If you are interested in supporting the post-production and circulation of Her Inherent Belonging, please contact Director Madison McClintock.
For a more comprehensive overview of the film and visual treatment please visit the film website .
Wilhelm Canaris is an early, staunch supporter of Adolf Hitler. A decorated WWI hero, Canaris shares Hitler’s anti-communist and pro-military beliefs. He believes Hitler will make Germany great again. He becomes Chief of the Abwehr, or Nazi Military Intelligence in 1935, part of Hitler’s inner circle.
When Hitler invades Poland, the atrocities begin and Canaris is appalled. He makes a bold choice and becomes a leader of the resistance. He creates a network that stretches across several European cities, including Berne, Paris, Madrid, as well as Istanbul. The Gestapo will come to refer to this network as The Black Orchestra. Canaris works with the Vatican to facilitate sharing intelligence with the Allies. He rescues hundreds of Jews from the Netherlands. He plans and facilitates several assassination attempts on Hitler.
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In Threads: Kosal’s Reel, the moving life story of Kosal Nhean, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, is interwoven with that of her volunteer English teacher (Shanee), a Jewish American woman from the Boston area, who first met Kosal when the latter was a newly arrived refugee in San Francisco in 1986. Kosal later relocated to southern California, where she raised her four children as a single parent while working two jobs — one at a donut-shop counter, the other as a seamstress. Using vivid footage shot in Cambodia and California over the course of two and a half decades, and supported by a riveting historical backdrop of archival footage, the relationship of these two women, which began as pupil and teacher when both were in their early 20s, grows into a remarkable lifelong friendship. Resonances between Kosal’s experience and that of Shanee’s grandmother, Gittel, who fled pogroms in Ukraine during the early 1920s to find refuge in Hartford, Connecticut, make it clear that across differences of culture and context, it is possible to build a bridge and be moved by each other’s stories.
In a de facto challenge to implicit stereotypes about a woman who earns a low wage and speaks English with a Cambodian accent, the many layers of Kosal’s experience are gradually revealed: the ordeals she endured in the four-year genocide; her having saved several others’ lives through ingenuity and daring; her narrow escape, on foot, to a refugee camp, while carrying her newborn daughter in her arms; the hardships she and her family faced during their six years in a Thai refugee camp; and, in 1985, at long last, their arrival in the United States. Through shots of Kosal’s day-to-day life in California, viewers come to appreciate the enormous challenges she has overcome in providing an education and solid values for her 4 children in a low-income urban neighborhood in which pressures to join gangs, drop out of high school, and abuse drugs are ubiquitous. There are shots of and interviews with various members of Kosal’s family. These include her ex-husband, whom the Khmer Rouge had forced Kosal to marry on pain of death and who abandoned her and their 4 children shortly after their arrival in the US, and their eldest son, who served in the US army during the war in Iraq.
When Kosal’s father, a widely revered Buddhist monk, age 95, is on his deathbed, Kosal finally overcomes her fears of returning to Cambodia, and, after more than a 20-year absence, travels back to the Buddhist temple he heads, taking along her 17-year-old daughter, Saroeutrh Kayla, a vibrant, sensitive young woman who was born in the refugee camp and is now thoroughly Americanized, yet intensely eager to learn about her heritage. At the temple, Kosal reunites with her beloved, long-lost sister Kim Sat (a Buddhist nun and an extraordinary woman in her own right), and finally learns the fate of their four brothers.
Although in some ways specific to the Cambodian American experience, this film touches upon wider, archetypal themes that are relevant not only for refugees and immigrants, but for all human beings who seek wholeness, and who strive to preserve meaningful ties with family and friends, and to repair those connections that have been severed by historical and political events. The film’s title – along with the imagery and motif of sewing – evokes the effort to gather together the threads of one’s life, and to pick up the pieces one has lost along the way. The title also alludes to the continuing bonds between the dead and the living, and our ancestors and descendants.
The film is currently in post-production, and funding is urgently needed to cover the costs of bringing the final version to fruition. A pre-release screening is scheduled to take place on Thursday afternoon, November 13, 2025, at Yale University.
The Crew:
Shanee Stepakoff: Director, Producer. Shanee holds a BA in English, summa cum laude, from the University of Maine, an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and is nearing completion of a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 2021) and of over two dozen scholarly essays, articles, and chapters on literary and artistic responses to collective trauma. She has won awards for her writing in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Shanee also spent two years as a psychologist/trainer with CVT (Center for Victims of Torture), first in Guinea and later in Jordan. From 2005 to 2007 she was the psychologist for witnesses at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Additionally, she provided training for Cambodian NGOs responsible for the provision of psychosocial support for witnesses in the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Shanee’s vision for Threads: Kosal’s Reel began crystallizing in early 1986, shortly after she graduated from college in Worcester, Massachusetts and moved to San Francisco, where she volunteered as an English-as-a-second language teacher for Cambodian refugee women and first encountered the film’s subject, Kosal Nhean.
Tiffany Cunningham: Co-Producer, Editor. BA, Yale University, 1989. Dr. Cunningham (a.k.a. Tiff) worked as an editorial assistant, historical researcher, production assistant and audio-lineup assistant for the award-winning feature-length documentary, A Double Life. For Threads: Kosal’s Reel, Tiff has been a key decision-maker re. which visual, audio, interview, and archival material to include, and has drawn on her extensive experience as a genealogical researcher to integrate themes of ancestry and family history (both Kosal’s and Shanee’s) into the story.
Alrick Brown: Associate Director, Associate Producer, Lead Cinematographer, Artistic Advisor. BA and M.Ed., Rutgers; MFA in Filmmaking, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Brown is a tenured Associate Professor of Undergraduate Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a writer and director whose films have screened in over thirty film festivals and at Lincoln Center, and have won major honors and prizes, including the Sundance World Cinema Audience Award for his first feature film, Kinyarwanda. His cinematic reach also includes credits on the small screen as director, producer and writer on a wide variety of award-winning projects.
Catherine Masud: Consulting Producer, Editorial Consultant. BA, Brown University, MFA in Film, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Catherine is an award-winning filmmaker and educator, with over 30 years of production experience in documentary and fiction films. As a producer/director/writer/editor, her work has won major awards in Cannes and other international festivals and competed in the Oscars. Her most recent feature-length documentary (A Double Life, 2023) won the Audience Favorite Award at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
Sophy Theam: Lead Khmer-English Translator, BA, Boston College. Ms. Theam arrived in the United States in 1984 as a child refugee from Cambodia, and grew up in Connecticut. She has worked for the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association of Greater Lowell; the Khmer Youth and Family Center of Lynn, Massachusetts; Southeast Asian Bilingual Advocates; and several other agencies serving the Cambodian American community as a Khmer-English translator and in other capacities. Ms. Theam has been the lead translator for Threads: Kosal’s Reel for the past twenty years, and has checked and refined the work of the other four translators.
Lawrence ‘Apu’ Rosario: Cinematographer for Cambodia 2001 shoot. Bachelor of Arts, Notre Dame College, Dhaka, MFA in Motion Picture Photography, Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. Mr. Rosario is a Bangladeshi cinematographer with extensive credits across more than three decades. He received the BACHSAS Award and the National Film Award for Best Cinematographer in 2011 (both for Amar Bondhu Rashed) and the FFTG Award for Best Cinematographer in 2020 (We).
Micah Schaffer: Co-Cinematographer, Sound Recordist. BA Stanford University, MFA, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Micah’s first feature documentary, Death of Two Sons, was awarded the HBO “Life Through Your Lens” Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. Micah was the cinematographer on “Shadows of a Leader: Qaddafi’s Female Bodyguards”, an official selection at the Montreal World Film Festival. He was the co-producer for “Iron Ladies of Liberia”, a PBS/BBC documentary about Africa’s first female president.
In the fall of 2024, Erin Vonder Haar began having visions—fragments of dancers moving through collapsing landscapes, a lone figure appearing again and again, and a story without words pulling her toward something sacred. Weeks later, her grandmother passed away. She left Erin a gift—one final offering—that would become the seed for a short film rooted in grief, memory, and spiritual presence.
GRACE is the story of Tyler, a young man haunted by the loss of someone he loved. Across shifting realities, he begins to encounter the same mysterious figure—pulling him through fractured memories, alternate timelines, and unspoken grief. Through movement and visual metaphor, GRACE explores the question: how do we make peace with the unknown, and what remains of us in the spaces between?
Told without traditional dialogue, the film blends original choreography, surreal visuals, and live audio recordings of the filmmaker’s late grandmother—who, in a sense, narrates the journey from beyond. The story is less linear than it is felt, designed to echo the way grief warps time and how the body remembers what the mind forgets.
More than a dance film, GRACE is a cinematic ritual. It brings together over 30 creatives—dancers, designers, filmmakers, composers—from Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and beyond. It’s a community-powered offering made possible through generosity, vision, and the quiet force of legacy.
We follow the characters across natural landscapes, other timelines and a primordial void, through dream states and grounded truth. And as Tyler learns to loosen his grip on control, he begins to glimpse the GRACE that’s been with him all along.
Impact & Invitation
Your donation supports dancers, choreographers, filmmakers, editors, and designers—freelance artists working at the intersection of grief, healing, and creation. This film doesn’t just honor a legacy—it builds one.
Follow our journey:
@projectgrace57 on Instagram and TikTok
Yule Film Festival is a holiday-inspired film festival in its 7th year, tentatively taking place at Sea Tea Improv Theater (Hartford, CT). Yule Film Fest seeks to bring soft humor, dark humor, and a variety of other emotions to screen as it prides itself on playing an extremely diverse mix of short films. It will be weird, unique, and beautiful.
Yule Film Fest upholds the mission to connect lesser-represented communities to a larger Entertainment industry. Yule Film Fest has screened and featured multiple award-winning works from award-winning filmmakers, while continuing to help those looking for a foundation on their filmmaking journey.
At this time, the plan for Yule Film Fest is to hold both online and in-person events in December 2026.
Find us at:
yulefilmfest.org
