CREDITS
Director
Iyabo Kwayana
Key Collaborator/ Writer
Luther Clement Lam
Producers
Chris Hastings
Maori Karmel Holmes
Nevo Shinaar
Animation Director
Charlotte Bee Her Hong
Animators
Iona Waller
Animation Producer
Giuliana Foulkes
Animation Assistants
Georgia Reid
Sarah Oh
Joshua Davis
Additional Animation
Mira Ram
Joshua Davis
Co-Creator
Alaf Kwayana
Edited by
Iyabo Kwayana
Sound Design
Josh Ascalon
Sound Mixer
Jim Sullivan
ANIMATION TEAM
Charlotte Bee Her Hong
Iona Waller
Mira Ram
Georgia Reid
Sarah Oh
Joshua Davis
Charlotte is a Chicago—based animation artist, filmmaker, and writer from Singapore. They are the recipient of the 2020 Southeast Asian Film Lab Fellowship Prize, and a graduate of the BFA Experimental Animation program at vCalifornia Institute of the Arts. Their film work has enjoyed international screenings from Ann Arbor Film Festival to Leeds Queer Film Festival. They work primarily in stop—motion animation these days, and it deepens their belief that objects have secret lives of their own. They love drawing because it invites nonsense, and they love cinema because they found a home there, by counting themself as one among its myriad ghosts. In their spare time, they enjoy playing with their wife and cats, cooking, and committing crimes.
Reflections on the animation process:
Iyabo is an independent filmmaker whose career spans from serving as director/DP of fiction films, to director/(co)cinematographer of award-winning documentaries. Her work has been licensed by both Criterion Channel and the World Channel-PBS and has screened widely both domestically and internationally on the festival circuit. Iyabo currently teaches filmmaking at Dartmouth College.
Maori is a curator, filmmaker and writer. She founded BlackStar in 2012 and serves as its Artistic Director and CEO. She has organized programs in film at a myriad of organizations including Anthology Film Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The Underground Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. As a director, her works have screened internationally including her feature documentary Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip—Hop (2006). She has also directed and produced works for Colorlines.com, Visit Philadelphia, and singer—songwriter India.Arie. Her writing has most recently appeared in The Believer, Film Quarterly, Seen, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, and How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance. Maori received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and her BA in History from American University. She currently serves on the board of American Documentary (POV), Asian Arts Initiative, the advisory boards of Ulises, Vidiots, and Lightbox Film Center; and is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, The Community Board, and Programmers of Color Collective. Maori was a 2019-2020 Soros Equality Fellow and serves as Mediamaker-in-Residence at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Curator-at-Large at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and a Creative Executive with Blackbird.
Nevo Shinaar is a creative producer based in Chicago. His award—winning films played at film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, AFI Docs and Palm Springs, showcased on POV-PBS, the NY Times and The Atlantic Selects, and supported by Tribeca Film Institute and Kartemquin Films. Nevo serves as Head of Development for Mitten Media for both scripted and documentary. He is a founding member of the award-winning SITE collective, and of Wolf + Me Films. In 2020, he was included in Newcity Film 50. Nevo holds an MFA from Northwestern University in Documentary Media and a BFA from the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel-Aviv University.
A founding team member in the development and production of Black Entertainment Television’s award-winning BET Tonight. At WGBH, Chris has worked with children television’s program ZOOM and the WGBH Lab, an innovative incubator for up-and-coming filmmakers. Chris joined WORLD Channel in 2011, where he co-created the award-winning documentary series America ReFramed, Local, USA, and Doc World, and provided editorial oversight to the other original series on WORLD. Series in Chris’s portfolio has won many awards, including a Peabody Award, a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, and national news and documentary Emmy award.