Interviews

Violet Vendetta is the kind of film that reminds audiences why they fell in love with movies in the first place. Blending high-energy action, sharp comedy, and a heartfelt appreciation for the filmmaking process, Ted Hayden's festival favorite follows two aspiring filmmakers whose dream project spirals into a real-life action adventure.

Haibei Wang has built a distinctive career by bridging cultures, genres, and storytelling traditions. Originally from China and now based in New York, the composer has worked across film, musical theatre, animation, documentaries, and video games, developing a voice that combines cinematic orchestration with contemporary textures and Eastern influences.

Floored is a sharp and wildly funny black comedy that uses satire to explore motherhood, aging, identity, and the search for connection in a world overflowing with expectations and self-proclaimed solutions. Directed by Marchelle Bradanini and Emily Alpren under their creative partnership Plan D, the film follows an aging actress whose search for healing leads her into a chaotic circle of women confronting their own insecurities, frustrations, and suppressed rage.

With Love Song, filmmaker Love Nafi delivers an emotionally layered story about ambition, creativity, love, and the quiet sacrifices that shape our lives. Selected for the 2026 American Black Film Festival, the episodic drama follows a successful music producer whose unexpected reunion with a former collaborator forces him to confront unresolved emotions and the fragile balance between passion and commitment.

In Leap and Soar, director Denzel Vazquez crafts an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and emotional distance. Through restrained performances, poetic visuals, and moments of profound silence, the film explores the fragile bond between a mother and son struggling to reconnect after loss. In this interview with IndieWrap, Vazquez discusses the deeply personal inspirations behind the project, the influence of artists like Edward Hopper and Emmanuel Lubezki, and his desire to create a story that transcends language through pure emotion.

With Foreign Tongue, filmmaker Boris Mojsovski delivers a deeply original exploration of identity, belonging, and perception through the unlikely lens of Foreign Accent Syndrome. Blending comedy, magic realism, and emotional honesty, the film follows Kathy, a North American woman who suddenly wakes up speaking with a thick Bosnian accent — transforming her overnight into an outsider within her own world. In this conversation with IndieWrap, Mojsovski reflects on his own immigrant experience, the delicate balance between humour and heartbreak, and the poetic, deeply human questions at the heart of the film.

With BAAB, Nayla Al Khaja delivers her most intimate and uncompromising work to date. A psychological dark fantasy rooted in grief, sound, and Arab folklore, the film unfolds through the fractured inner world of a woman haunted by the loss of her twin sister. Rejecting linear storytelling in favor of atmosphere, silence, and sensory disorientation, BAAB becomes less a narrative than an experience — one that invites the viewer to step through a threshold where reality, memory, and myth collide.

Los Angeles–based producer Desmond Qi Hong Loh represents a new generation of filmmakers navigating storytelling across formats, cultures, and platforms. A graduate of California State University, Northridge’s Film Production program, Loh has built a body of work that moves fluidly between award-winning short films, high-performing vertical dramas, and global digital media.

More than twenty years after publishing The Poetic Repercussion, writer and filmmaker Mark Anthony Thomas returns to the words that shaped his earliest creative life—not to revisit them with nostalgia, but to translate them forward. In Need of Seawater, directed by Richard Yeagley, is the first chapter of a poetic documentary trilogy that transforms memory into movement, and poetry into a living, cinematic language.

Winner of the 2025 Goya Award for Best Documentary Short Film, Seeds From Kivu is not simply a documentary—it is an act of witness. Directed by Néstor López and Carlos Valle, the film takes viewers deep into eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where women who have survived extreme sexual violence seek healing at Panzi Hospital under the care of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege.