In 1956, Olive Higgins Prouty became the benefactor of a sacred healing garden, known worldwide as the Prouty Garden, at the famed Boston Children’s Hospital. The agreement was that the Olmsted-designed garden would exist, “as long as there are patients, families and staff to enjoy it.”
In 2012, the hospital administration began quietly moving forward with a plan to replace the half acre garden with a new billion-dollar medical complex. Hospital workers protested by starting an online petition and formed “The Friends of the Prouty Garden” to persuade the hospital to use one of the 14 other plans that would spare the Prouty Garden.
The filmmaker, Michael Bavaro, documented the Friends’ activity at the behest of his niece, Caitlin O’Hara, a lifelong patient with Cystic Fibrosis and a driving force behind the Friends’ campaign. The Friends used the law to speak truth to power, and created public awareness of the delicate balance of nature and the core values of the medical profession.
This retrospective is told by patients, families and staff, and pioneers of urban landscape architecture. It tells the story of Mrs. Prouty’s vision and unearths the forgotten history of the Longwood Medical area.
Format: 3 x 50’ 4K+ Documentary Series
Production Company: Moving Pictures Africa
Producer/Cinematographer: Robert Hofmeyr
The Misfits is an intimate documentary series that transports viewers into the lives of the lions living alongside the Chobe River in Northern Botswana. The story unfolds in a spectacular environment shaped by a remarkable river that flows in both directions, serving as a crucial water source for thousands of animals.
Unlike traditional lion documentaries that focus on dominant, ruling prides, this series shines a spotlight on the “undercats”. We follow the Misfits, a unique sisterhood of lionesses living in the perilous no-man’s-land between the formidable Riverfront and Ngoma prides. Lacking adult males of their own to protect them, this unique coalition must rely entirely on their intelligence, cunning, and teamwork to survive in this incredible environment.
Rather than utilizing a standard factual voiceover, the story of The Misfits will be narrated by a local woman storyteller. Adopting the style of a traditional fable or folk tale, the narration weaves together the lives of the lionesses, other animals, and the river itself into a single, immersive narrative. The Chobe River acts as the unifying thread, acting as a silent witness to every birth, hunt, and conflict.
The Characters
Broken Paw: The heart of our story and a symbol of pure resilience. Despite a severe injury sustained over four years ago that should have been a death sentence, this amazing lioness has survived through the fierce loyalty and cooperation of the sisterhood. Today, she is successfully raising a cub of her own – a living testament to the Misfits’ strength.
Stumpy: The fearless leader, named for her missing tail tip. A master strategist who orchestrates the pride’s movements and teaches the next generation the art of survival.
Blackmouth: Unlike most cats, Blackmouth submerges her entire face when she drinks, and as a result she usually has mud on her chin. She is a devoted mother raising a new litter against impossible odds in a territory patrolled by rivals.
Lucky: The youngest of the Misfits. So far, she has been lucky and has no obvious injuries or quirks.
Production Status
Over the past three years, our team has spent over 26 weeks in the field across nine shoots. We have already captured over 250 hours of 8K50p RAW footage, documenting hunting sequences, new cubs, and the complex dynamics between the lions, leopards, and elephant herds of the Chobe ecosystem. We have finished filming episode 1 and most of episodes 2 and 3 and we are currently raising funds for post-production and to complete the final 10 weeks of filming during the dry season of late 2026.
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.
PIECES OF BEETHOVEN:
featuring Steven Isserlis, Gabriela Montero, Steven Osborne and the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen with Paavo Järvi
Two hundred years ago Beethoven died, and fans and scavengers descended, looking for souvenirs. Our film for the bicentenary starts with his death, and discovers how the scattered fragments of his manuscripts (and hair) are being reassembled and deciphered, through a magical marriage of dedicated scholarship and brand-new technology. The story circles around his Eroica Symphony, written at a moment of great crisis, and cementing his reputation as the first, and greatest, artist hero of Western music.
When Beethoven dies in March 1827, he’s the most famous musician in Europe, and worshippers flock to pay homage – with scissors. Three days later, he’s completely bald; everyone wants a piece of him.
His celebrity arises from the time and place, as well as his talent. Beethoven bursts on the scene as the Enlightenment is set on fire by French revolutionary ideas. As Napoleon approaches, German Romanticism is born, and with it the idea of the artist creator, the bridge between mortals and God. Beethoven is the perfect embodiment of this; unlike most of his predecessors, writing to order as servants of the nobility, Beethoven declares that his talent makes him the equal of any aristocrat. He writes what he wants, when he wants – and then invites patrons to pay for it.
So, he can spend months, or years, working and reworking a single piece; and all those notes and ideas are in a vast hoard of musical sketchbooks, which he cherishes and takes with him on his frequent moves around Vienna (he’s a noisy, alarming and unpopular neighbour). When the sketchbooks and manuscripts are scattered at Beethoven’s death, the secret of his genius vanishes too. But today, forensic science, musical detective work and passionate perseverance are putting the pieces back together.
The first challenge is to locate these scattered pages and then fit them together in the right order. Without dates or page numbers, and given the unintelligible scrawl of Beethoven’s handwriting, Julia Ronge at the Beethoven-Haus shows us how ink colours, quill shapes and even matching blotches serve as clues. Beethoven’s moods and moments of inspiration are also revealed: a whole page replaced by a single bar, or entirely scribbled over, not from bad temper but a determination to get it right.
Meanwhile, what of the hair? Locks of ‘Beethoven’s Hair’ have been cherished and passed down through generations. Tristan Begg, a young Beethoven obsessive, reads the Heiligenstadt Testimony, in which Beethoven pours out his despair at his failing hearing, and his hopes that one day, doctors will find out why he suffers so badly with his health.
Tristan happens also to be a palaeogeneticist, working in the lab where the Neanderthal genome has just been sequenced, using ancient tissue fragments. Tristan realises that he may be able to do the same for Beethoven and fulfil his hero’s wish, using those carefully guarded scraps of hair. But when he manages to assemble four of them and finally analyses their DNA – they’re all different. Only one, if that, is Beethoven’s; but how to find out which one? Tristan thinks his years of work are wasted. Only long walks listening to Beethoven’s music comfort him.
The music he listens to is the Third (Eroica) Symphony, written just after the Heiligenstadt Testimony: the composer’s blazing refusal to accept his fate, tearing up the musical rules as he does so.
Alan Gosman and Lewis Lockwood have spent twenty years deciphering the sketchbook for this symphony. What they find is an extraordinary record of Beethoven’s work over years, not just on this one piece but also the famous opening of the Fifth Symphony – and the odd commercial crowdpleaser, knocked out when funds are running low.
They show us Beethoven getting more and more excited as he finds new possibilities in the music, his handwriting speeding up and his crossings-out wilder, as he realises that deafness is not going to destroy him, but may actually be the making of him.
We hear this from Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen orchestra, showing us Beethoven at work, trying out different versions of the great fanfare that announces the final movement.
But what comes then? A whispered tune, so simple it can be plucked on a violin string.
Gosman and Lockwood show us where this tune began; in a piano theme and variations, which Beethoven developed through his favourite party trick of improvising at the piano. He was even more famous as an improviser than a composer in his life; but with no means of recording, most of his improvisations have been lost.
Today’s greatest improvising composer is Gabriela Montero, who can instantly turn any pop song or advertising jingle into a complex masterpiece; we watch and listen to her meeting Beethoven’s theme and variations for the first time and adding her own twist to it.
And unlike Beethoven, Gabriela has the benefit of modern technology: she shows us how a computer records and transcribes every note she improvises, for her to refine into a new work.
Meanwhile, Tristan has managed to get hold of another, authenticated lock of Beethoven’s hair, which he can compare with the others; his project has a pulse again. It matches one of the previous four, so now he’s sure he’s got Beethoven’s DNA. He finds a tendency to liver disease and a Hepatitis B infection, explaining Beethoven’s final illness.
He also finds very high levels of lead, that may have contributed to Beethoven’s still unexplained deafness. Why? The answer lies in the ‘conversation books’ Beethoven used to communicate when he could no longer hear what people said to him. There are 139 of these, a random jumble of chat, shopping lists, notes to himself and scraps of music, which have taken decades not just to transcribe, but also turn into sense. But one thing comes up a lot; Beethoven’s fondness for sweet Hungarian wine. And it was sweetened, as wine had been since Roman times, with lead.
Tristan has now found a new lock of hair, dating from the time when Beethoven’s deafness became impossible to ignore. We find out what he discovers.
Steven Isserlis is famous for his hair. He says he had it cut, once: never again. He’s also one of the world’s top cellists. Beethoven didn’t write much cello music, so Steven takes us to Beethoven’s birthplace in Bonn and shows us, with musicologist and pianist Professor Robert Levin, how the few sonatas he did write are like snapshots of the different stages of his life.
By the time Beethoven goes to work on his final piano masterpiece, the ‘Diabelli’ Variations, he’s old and ill, in constant pain. Julia Ronge shows us in the sketchbook how slowly he is now working, and how much less confident of his first ideas; the sketchbook is full of notes not just crossed out but scratched completely away with a knife, to make sure only the right version gets to the printer.
And in between, there are scribbles in different pens and in red chalk, notes to himself – it’s a total mess. But somewhere in here is the ageing Beethoven, working not just on this piano piece but also the work that cemented his fame, the 9th Symphony. How to make sense of it, to get into his head?
Once again, technology comes to the rescue; Susanne Cox and Johannes Kepper at the ‘Beethovens Werkstatt’ project have pioneered software that analyses and separates each different musical idea, sometimes dozens on a single page. She shows us a scribble magically morphing into notes, and then the finished sketch. And then we see and hear the magnificence of the finished Diabelli Variations, one of the most challenging works in the piano repertoire, performed by international virtuoso Steven Osborne – one moment lyrical, the next as radical as Steven’s other great love, modern jazz.
There’s another mystery in the Diabelli sketchbook: fingerings. Beethoven always made sure there was a piano wherever he went, even after he lost his hearing. Why would he have needed a piano, when he was already completely deaf?
David Ginty has an explanation: he runs the neuroscience lab at Harvard, and he’s recently discovered that certain kinds of touch are processed together with hearing, in the brain, Beethoven could have heard through his hands.
Tristan’s final discovery is the most startling. When he first sequenced Beethoven’s DNA he took samples from the van Beethovens living today – and found they were totally different in the male line. Beethoven wasn’t a Beethoven. The others, whose identities rest on this relationship, are understandably devastated. But recently Tristan tracked down somebody alive today whose DNA is almost identical to Ludwig’s. Exclusively for this film, he’s about to find out who Beethoven really was.
We end the film with the orchestra performing the barnstorming finale of the Eroica, having watched and listened to it developing under Beethoven’s hands and in his head, through sketchbooks, improvisations, and the final corrected copy sent to the publishers.
Famously, Beethoven scrubbed out his original dedication, to Napoleon, and just called it ‘Eroica’ – ‘Heroic’. It’s a fitting description of Beethoven himself, struggling and persevering, checking every note and marking until he’s satisfied.
But the other heroes of this story are the musicians and scholars who dedicate years, or decades, of their lives to the painstaking collecting and deciphering of scattered documents.
We live in an age where digital technology has made the traces of our lives evanescent; no postcards, letters, notebooks, pictures – just binary code that vanishes as quickly as it appears. Yet these scraps of paper have survived for two centuries; and, properly read, they show us why Beethoven still towers above all other composers and transport us right into the head of Western music’s greatest genius, hearing his music as never before.
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 Siliotto
Consulting 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
Concerned about their personal safety in the shadow of an expanding mine, Damin, a Romani teenager, has taken up boxing to defend his village.
Bor, Serbia. The Chinese company Zijin has bought out the copper mines, expanding them to swallow homes, town centers, and entire villages. The most recent victim of this expansion is the Romani settlement of Zmajevo, which has come to be encircled by the mines. Inspired by these changes, and concerned for their immediate safety, many of the Romani have taken up boxing in order to protect themselves. Now, Zmajevo is under the threat of destruction as Zijin has secured the rights to the land upon which it lies. The residents of Bor and Zmajevo go about their days, working to make ends meet and regularly training to box as this cloud of anxiety hangs over their heads.
Filmic Methods & Visual Style: With our film, we hope to reflect the agency these children seek through a participatory method where the subjects themselves are given a camera to film their experiences. The end result will be a film that combines first-hand experiences filmed by the kids with an observatory perspective by the filmmaker.
Tone: The people of Zmajevo speak from deeply personal and often conflicting perspectives, and without independent evidence, many of their claims cannot be corroborated. Rather than trying to resolve those contradictions, we want to embrace them. By allowing people to speak for themselves, the film creates a deliberately subjective environment in which memory, rumor, fear, and resentment all become part of the reality we are documenting. In that sense, the film is not ultimately about whether Chinese companies are “taking over” the mines or the village. It is about the way a community constructs a narrative to make sense of enormous changes happening around it. And, hopefully, how that narrative can become meaningful regardless of whether every part of it is objectively true.
Sound will play an important role in expressing this tension.We want the film to move between these extremes, contrasting the overwhelming sounds of the mines to the pointed punches of the boxers, while allowing the camera to hypnotically linger when it matters. Our aim is a film that feels propulsive without being relentless—immersive in its rhythms, but patient enough to let the people of Zmajevo define the world on their own terms.
Future Subjects: The material that we have shot thus far moves through the narratives of the children, the boxers, and the common laborers of Zmajevo. However, one missing link remains: the Chinese miners themselves. The mines that have transformed the village often feel strangely distant, despite being an overwhelming presence in the town the laborers are alienated by their foreign status and a different language. In the same way that the camera becomes personal for the Romani in this village, we hope to create a dialectic with the new Chinese presence that has arrived in this village, seeking to capture the entire spirit of Zmajevo.
For our project, we have hired a Chinese translator and are in contact with the media liaison of the Zijin mines to set up interviews with the miners themselves, which will be necessary to complete the picture of Zmajevo.
About the Filmmaker:
Oliver Ciric is a Serbian-American filmmaker based in Boston, MA. He’s a recent film production graduate of Emerson College, where he worked on a variety of award-winning films. His feature length documentary The Bird (Or: Marty, Clown) (2021) premiered in-competition at the 14th Beldocs IFF, where he was the youngest filmmaker to have a film in competition. His recent short film, “The Noblemen,” is currently in the film festival circuit.
Director’s Statement:
Taking the bus with Damin, we left Zmajevo for the center of Bor, where he trains his boxing. Surrounded by his coaches, teammates, and friends, he leaned in to say “Oliver, here I am no longer Damin (a traditional Romani name), call me Nenad (a traditional Serbian name).” At this point, I was loosely exploring the prospect of making a documentary in Bor, but this sentiment of Nenad’s touched me as I realized that it was poignant in my own life. As a Serbian-American, I had two separate answers to the question “where are you from?” If I were asked this in the U.S., I would say I was Serbian; elsewhere I would say I’m American, but it wasn’t until Damin asked me to call him Nenad that I realized how inherent the compartmentalization of my own identities were.
Like many other filmmakers before me, I set my sights on the historically significant copper mining town of Bor, Serbia. Bor was one of the first outposts of French investments in the Balkans; a priority for the Nazis during the invasion of Yugoslavia; a poignant setting for pioneering Yugoslavian artists such as Dušan Makavejev. Today, it is assessed to be one of the largest copper deposits in the world as multiple countries still vie for influence within the town. I saw Bor as a city that continues to hold its status as the weathervane for Serbia, as the town rapidly became an outpost for Chinese Neo-colonialism.
Most importantly, Bor is the ultimate test of national identity in contrast to one’s place. Deep in the heart of Serbia, Bor lies as a town that is dominated by the Chinese, the Romani, and the Vlachs, perhaps making it one of the most diverse cities in the Balkans. Being here, I wondered: what makes someone Serbian? I have felt less Serbian in my life because I didn’t live in Serbia, but is living in Serbia enough to make one feel Serbian?
With open arms, I was invited into the Romani community of Zmajevo, a village that doesn’t even appear on maps nor government censuses. I heard tales of conflicting identities, a helpless political situation, and an uncertain future. In these children, I saw myself, conflicted with my own identity and unsure of how Serbian I am. Beyond this, I saw people who are Serbian-speaking citizens of Serbia, yet are discriminated against within their own country. I saw myself within this community of people who are conflicted about their identity within their environment.
Filming in the village one day, Damin emerged from his home, walked into my frame, proudly proclaiming “I am a boxer! Watch me fight!” Seeing the bold charisma and perseverance of this young man, I knew I had a story that must be told.
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.
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.
CHECK OUT OUR PITCH DECK:
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.
