Jane Bella Kharkover is a graduate of Syracuse University and sports a resume of many short films and festival entries. She enjoys telling stories through her dialogue as well as the musical influences around her to create a one-of-a-kind moving image for her viewers.

“This film illustrates grief and its significance in our lives as we get older.”

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Siara-Lauren Brown (they/she) is a queer and biracial filmmaker from South Florida. Siara-Lauren’s stories and voice combine narrative with experimental, dynamic expression, and visual poetry. When they are not writing, they are finding every art and food fusion place New York has to offer.

‘Life in the Between’ was created because I wanted to be the person I needed when I was younger. It was very confusing to have so many questions about my identity at such a young age and to see my siblings have drastically different experiences. Reading interviews and research about the different biracial identities that exist in the U.S. as well as some inspiration from my own life made making the story such a cathartic experience. I made this film for anyone that has ever felt like an outsider.

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Born in London and raised in Tel Aviv, I served over a year in the IDF as an NCO of education and culture before volunteering for social service. During my service, I split my time between teaching in a primary school integrating children with special needs and developing the Film Club at the Reich Center for Elderly People. The Film Club offered a free-of-charge series of weekly lectures, including full-length film screenings followed by workshops. After completing my service, I moved to Prague, where I studied in the directing department at FAMU. In 2017, I relocated to London and obtained my BA in Film Studies at the MetFilm School (University of West London). For my graduation project, I wrote BECHORA, my third short film, which premiered at the BFI Film Festival and Palm Springs ShortFest. The script received a special mention from the UK Jewish Film Fund, and the film won the Best Short Film Award at the Solidarity Film Festival in Tel Aviv. Three years after living in Europe, I returned to Tel Aviv and joined the MFA Film and Television Studies program at Tel Aviv University.

“When I was a little girl, people often asked me, ‘Who do you love more: Mom or Dad?’ My answer was always – Guy. The second my brother entered my life, I knew it was true love, the closest and the most remarkable friendship. Every night I would sleep with him in the same bed and tell him stories until he fell asleep. Guy and I attended the same school. We were separated into three age groups, one floor, and a long corridor. One afternoon when only a few classrooms remained to study, I found Guy folded up on the steps, with all his belongings strewn along the floor. In the background, I heard a boy running. Guy was pretty apathetic to what happened, while I could not bear to think that someone was harassing my little brother. I ran after the boy until I grabbed him by his shirt, pinned him to the wall, and slapped him. As a result of the incident, the possibility that I would have to leave school arose. Sibling relationships fascinate me, and this has always been the case. My relationship with Guy was so special, not only because of the deep love we acquired for each other but because of the extraordinary person he is. Guy was (and remains) a unique child. Back then, I did not know it. I thought he was just my little brother and probably like any other. In retrospect, I can call this uniqueness by its name: Asperger’s.”

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Rachel Myers is an award-winning filmmaker, Time Warner 150 Artist, and Tribeca alumni. Her film, Wendy’s Shabbat, qualified for the Academy Awards and was broadcast on PBS. She is a winner of Ovation, NAACP, Broadway World, and Streamy Awards, and is the inaugural recipient of the Shondaland-Women’s-Directing-Mentorship, Sundance Co-lab, and a nominee for the Lynn Shelton Grant.

“For years, my grandmother has attended the weekly ritual of Shabbat dinner, meeting at the Wendy’s fast food restaurant near her home. For over eight years, the seniors in her community, most of them in their eighties and nineties, have congregated at Wendy’s to light Shabbat candles, say the blessings, and share challah and grape juice (no wine at Wendy’s). It is a weekly event and a meaningful celebration. I had often shared the story with friends in conversation, describing this lovely tradition and decided that it was time to document this gathering and her community. This is a film about rediscovering the joys of community and the importance of connection in older age while facing the fragility of our own mortality, and the longing for ritual, however unorthodox it may appear.”

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Yoo Lee is a writer and director specializing in stop-motion animation. As a Project Involve Fellow and a recipient of the Laika animation grant in 2021, she wrote and directed an animated short, 7LBS 8OZ, which won the Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short at the 30th annual Florida Film Festival in 2022, making it an Oscar qualifier for 2023. Her work is also distributed through the New Yorker Screening Room and HBO Max.

“In my mid-forties, I decided to change my career and went back to learn the fundamentals of animation. I am currently in the middle of finishing up my MFA in animation at USC and this is my 2nd-year student short.”

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Alex’s short films Kiss, Ari, Frail, and Snow have screened at 90+ film festivals worldwide, including Berlin and TIFF, and have won multiple awards. Together they have nearly 7 million online views. He is a winner of the Lexus Australia Film Fellowship and is mentored by Academy-nominated director Bruce Beresford. His feature films scripts have been placed as Finalists in the Golden Script, WeScreenplay, Shore Scripts, and Nicholl Screenwriting competitions.

“Like Ari, I had a recent experience where I desperately wanted to belong, and it was a very lonely time. I thought that being a different type of person would help that. But it didn’t! It just made me lonelier. So, for this film, I wanted to put these feelings into a creative form and tell a story about a character who didn’t like who they were and felt unseen and lonely. Because of this the character in the film, ‘Ari’, tries to change in order to better fit in but finds themself in an even more humiliating and lonely place than before. Ultimately, Ari comes to accept himself, to be more friendly and kind to the person he feels himself to be – I feel that is the most important thing if you want to overcome loneliness. To make space within yourself for the person you are. To not always try to ‘become’ but rather ‘to be’. Our culture doesn’t like this idea and is always telling us to change this or that, but I feel that the more genuine and in touch one can be to one’s own foibles/areas one is ashamed of, the more genuine the connections that follow will be.”

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Richard Ulrich is a Filipino, St. Louis-born filmmaker, director, producer, actor, and artist.

“My name is Richard; I am a storyteller. Sometimes I use acrylic and canvas to tell my stories, other times I piece together collages and visions, sometimes I’m in front of the camera, and other times I’m behind it, but regardless of the medium or situation, my art is mine and yours. Mine in all the ways that creating art and telling my story relieves me of any weight by transforming it into something we can share. Yours in all the ways that art is meant to be shared and felt together.”

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Karis Oh is an illustrator/2D animator who believes in the power of a good story that inspires people to look at the world in broader perspectives. This belief of hers has led Karis to pursue directing animated films and teaching aspiring artists.

“The Moment” was Karis’s student thesis film. The story is about the importance of the things unseen. Her main inspiration for the story was a TED Talk called “What Really Matters at the End of Life” by BJ Miller.

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Steven is an animator, artist, and writer who creates short films, comics, zines, performances, and installations. Steven makes inventive use of animation, illustration, puppetry, and kinetic art to present unique and interesting stories. Steven identifies as queer and autistic, and his animation and performance work has been screened and staged at many international film and arts festivals.

“Prosopagnosia is face blindness. This means that when I see a face, I find it difficult to determine who that person is. In order to understand what Prosopagnosia means to me and to try and live my best life, I developed a series of coping mechanisms and strategies. I first realized I may have a form of Prosopagnosia when I was receiving a diagnosis of autism. At this time, I had a compulsion to understand what a face is. Meaning – an understanding of what different elements make up a face; the eyes, the ears and the mouth for example. I started keeping diaries – written diaries and audio diaries which documented my experiences. I also started to sketch different faces. When doing this, I realized what a face actually looks like became clearer to me. I also took photographs and used instant photography. Polaroids felt immediate, effective, and were objects that I could hold and touch. This gave the faces in the photographs an added sense of realism and believability to me. There were no filters and editing, and I could instantly hold the results in my hands. Eventually I realized I had all these sketches, drawings, diaries, photographs, journals, and objects, so I put them together in a memory box. Within the film, I take a personal and intimate approach to the topic of Prosopagnosia. I open up this memory box to see what is inside, and the content of the box is the basis of the film.”

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Meg Griffiths and Scott Faris (co-directors) are the documentary filmmakers behind Universe Creative, a storytelling agency committed to social impact video storytelling. Former journalists, teachers, and nonprofit leaders, Meg and Scott have collaborated on short films for the past 10 years with an emphasis on education, rural communities, and Indigenous issues. They frequently collaborate with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other national foundations and nonprofits, and are currently in post-production on their first feature-length film set in southern West Virginia.

‘Into the Circle’ demonstrates the significant, personal impact that education models based on developing whole children can produce. Through the intimate account of a family courageous enough to share their struggles with a broad audience, the film offers an alternative to our contemporary schooling model by illustrating that physical and mental wellness are meaningfully connected to learning, that a child’s culture and language can be used to unlock profound growth in understanding and maturity, and that a school should be a true community for students and their families rather than simply a place children go to acquire knowledge. This is a story that can spur necessary conversations about the evolution of public education in the 21st century. Since 2013, the Native American Community Academy has operated at the site of the former Albuquerque Indian Boarding School, educating students from over 60 tribes. Most importantly, ‘Into the Circle’ is a testament to the virtues of a family from a region of the country – South Dakota’s reservations – that is characterized almost exclusively by narratives of poverty, alcoholism, and victimization. Though the Hollow Horns are touched by these issues, the film makes a deliberate effort to frame their story through an asset-based lens, showing how they found agency through their culture and history. This, too, should encourage dialogue and corrective action around the stories our society promotes to define Indigenous groups and the places they’re from.

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