While America’s food system threatens the health of the planet and its people, local farmers network to create sustainable pathways to food sovereignty for their communities.

Alexis Bell is a film director, producer, and an award-winning journalist from Newport News, Virginia. She makes it her mission to elevate voices and narratives seldom listened to or historically overlooked. Common threads of discrimination, injustice, and inequity repeatedly showed themselves to be the backdrop of stories she covered as a journalist. Now, Alexis uses film to drive impact, imagine different worlds, and create social change. Through her work, she curates a constructive and empowering ambience. Alexis is the impact producer for Freedom Hill, an award-winning documentary exploring environmental racism in Eastern North Carolina; and the production coordinator on the Sundance supported documentary, Basketball Heaven directed by Resita Cox.

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Rural Black and Latine residents confront systemic racism and a worsening environmental crisis in their century-long fight for prosperity, revealing a legacy of resistance that drives the community forward.

Daryl B. Jones is a documentary filmmaker and instructor. Daryl’s previous films include Tender, a short documentary about Black trans women managing the housing crisis in San Francisco. He also wrote, “Know Your Ethical Guidelines for Documentary Filmmaking,” and “Neither Diminished or Forgotten” for New Day Films. His oral history project, “The New Roxy Theater,” is archived at Jackson State University. He holds an MFA in social documentation from UC Santa Cruz.

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Tish Edwards, founder of Oakland’s first Black women’s motorcycle club D’Vious Wayz, balances caring for her disabled son while keeping the sisterhood alive.

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Jessica Jones is an Emmy® (CA-regional) nominated documentary filmmaker and editor. Her work often focuses on community, representation, and racial equity through character-driven narratives. She has edited content that has appeared on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, PBS, The New York Times and the BBC. In 2021, she completed the short film ON THE PULSE OF LIFE, which screened at the Smithsonian FUTURES exhibit and at numerous festivals nationwide. She was the 2011 George Stoney Fellow at Working Films, a 2013 BAVC Mediamaker Fellow, and a 2023-24 Sundance Documentary Contributing Editor Fellow. Currently, she is an SFFILM House and Wexner Center for the Arts resident. She is directing/editing the upcoming short documentary WOMEN WHO RIDE, and editing the feature documentary COACH EMILY.

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A New Yorker explores her family’s roots in NYC’s first non-segregated housing cooperative, finding an old solution to the current housing crisis, and examining her own homeownership dream.

Paulina Davis is making her directorial debut with the documentary “The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller.”  The in-production film is a 2024 DocPitch Audience Award winner (California Film Institute) and received a 2024 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts through its fiscal sponsor, New York Women in Film and Television. Paulina is a 2022-24 Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow. When she’s not working on her film, Paulina works in higher education. Paulinaholds a juris doctor cum laude from Howard University School of Law and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Delaware. She is currently living, playing, and working in her hometown of New York City.

AFROMYSTIC is a lyrical documentary that follows LGBTQ+ Yorùbá practitioners across the waters of Nigeria, Brazil, and the US in a quest for post-colonial liberation–through reclaiming/restoring the preeminence of indigenous religion.

Seyi Adebanjo, MFA, is a Queer Gender-Non-Conforming Nigerian artist who raises awareness around social issues through video. Seyi’s work exists at the intersection of art, imagination, ritual, and politics. Seyi is a 2024 Sundance Documentary Film Fund Awardee, a 2023 Sundance Institute Trans Possibilities Intensive Fellow and serves on the faculty of New York University. Seyi has received a Fatales Forward: Trans Stories Fellowship, an NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, and residency with The Laundromat Project. Seyi is a 2022 Semi-Finalist for the Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellowship. Seyi’s award winning documentaries “Justice for Islan Nettles” has screened on PBS Channel 13, and “Ọya: Something Happened On The Way To West Africa” continues to screen globally.

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Grappling with the impact of George Floyd’s murder, three Black women in Minneapolis embark on interweaving journeys to care for their communities and find inner healing.

Ashley Tyner is a writer, producer and filmmaker. She serves as Culture & Special Projects Editor at i-D Magazine, where she works to create space to amplify marginalized voices in the worlds of art and culture. She formerly led Special Projects for GARAGE Magazine. Ashley studied literature at Middlebury College and Columbia University. She is a Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow.

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A septuagenarian and community matriarch fights to preserve the oldest continuous Black Baptist Church in North America, her heritage, and the community’s history in Savannah, Georgia.

Caroline is a Kenyan-born filmmaker in Georgia with an MFA in film, drawn to telling stories featuring underserved communities and extraordinary individuals. She recently completed her first documentary feature film, The Price of Hope, which is currently in the festival circuit with selections including the Roxbury International Film Festival and Women Deliver Conference, one of the largest multi-sectoral convenings to advance gender equality. Caroline enjoys teaching film with experiences as a university professor and instructor to high school-age students. She is a board member of Savannah Women in Film and T.V. and a member of DOC Savannah and Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

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In “Little Haiti” Brooklyn a teenager challenges the ‘Angry Black Woman’ trope through poetry that ignites a quest for intergenerational healing and reclaiming her childhood in this lyrical coming-of-age film.

Chelsi Bullard is a Memphis-born and Brooklyn-based filmmaker and editor with an unwavering desire to restore beauty, well-being and complexity in stories about Black folx. She is a 2023 Big Sky Pitch participant and 2022-2023 Brown Girls Doc Mafia Black Directors Fellow. She edited the feature documentary THE RIGHT TO READ (Santa Barbara, 2023 and SXSW EDU, 2023) with director Jenny Mackenzie and executive producer LeVar Burton. She also recently co-edited LOCKED OUT (Kate Davis and Luchina Fisher) which was named ‘Best Documentary Feature’ at American Black Film Festival, 2023. She produced the feature documentary COMING AROUND directed by Sandra Itäinen (Frameline, 2023).

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To preserve delicate memories of her son and buried histories of the city he was killed in, a mother collaborates with her community to compose an elegiac portrait of love, loss, and legacy.

Shalon Buskirk is a community leader who has dedicated her life to protecting, helping, and saving young adults from violence within her community. After the tragic death of her firstborn son, Parris, she started to work towards a nonprofit for young adults that engages them with the resources they need for success. She is a storyteller, a mother of eight children, and the CEO/Founder of the Parris J. Lane Memorial Foundation. She was a Film Independent Documentary Lab Fellow in 2022, a Visiting Fellow at MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute in 2020 and 2022, and the co-author of United Hearts for Autism: Stories from Caregivers and Self-Advocates.

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Mother Wit, co-directed by Te Shima Anusha Brennen and Rajvi Desai, follows three Black trans women grieving the death of their matriarch as they fight to achieve their academic ambitions and fulfill promises they made to her.

Te Shima Anusha Brennen is a Black trans storyteller based in Brooklyn, NY. As an emerging documentary filmmaker, they aim to tell nuanced stories about Black queer and trans communities navigating institutions that fail them. Te made their directorial debut with Hold On To Me, which premiered at NewFest Film Festival in October 2022 and traveled to festivals in London, Amsterdam, Seattle, and LA in 2023. Outside of filmmaking, Te advocates improving journalistic practices that produce harmful narratives about trans communities. This culminated in a fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, where they researched how journalists can reduce these narratives.

William Tyner is a filmmaker and currently works as a researcher at Google across questions of justice, equity, and product inclusion. William is currently a Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow and the recipient of the 2018-2019 Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, Code for America Fellowship, and San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation Fellow. William studied Anthropology at Wesleyan University.