Documentary
Storm on the Stage is the story of an extraordinary challenge against time. With exactly three days to teach two highly demanding Turkish choreographies to American students, I faced a task that seemed almost impossible. Every rehearsal became a race against the clock—pushing through exhaustion, pressure, and doubt. This documentary captures the journey of transforming unfamiliar steps into a shared language, individual effort into unity, and a heartbeat into a performance. In just three days, the challenge was not simply to teach choreography, but to bring an entire group together and prepare them for the moment they would step onto the stage.
COMBAT MIRROR follows a groundbreaking brain-health research program - the Pearce study, currently in academic submission - built around one urgent question: can combat sports be made safer for the young fighters taking them up. With access to the researchers behind it, the coaches implementing it, and the fighters volunteering as its first subjects, the film tracks how early screening and defensive-technique reform could reduce the neurological toll of boxing and MMA before it starts. Made with the support of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, COMBAT MIRROR moves between the lab and the gym to argue that protecting a fighter's brain and protecting the sport are the same fight.
A Documentary Musical About the Warren Court and the Constitutional Revolution
Hamilton meets Ken Burns in this groundbreaking documentary musical that brings the landmark cases of the Warren Court to life through original music, historical storytelling, and innovative AI technology—including AI-generated voices, music, and lip-synching that allow real historical figures to “sing” their stories.
In the closure of the city’s last video rental stores, this short documentary finds its starting point to reflect on urban gentrification and the changing habits of consumption. Through disappearing spaces and the people who once inhabited them, the film connects the loss of these places with the transformation of the audiovisual medium and the arrival of artificial intelligence, used as a metaphor for an unstoppable technological change that redefines the way we live, consume, and relate to culture, leaving open the question of what is lost along the way.
In 1983, film student Rich Murray was handed $20,000 in a brown paper bag by a hustler named 'Butch.' These were the funds he used to direct his first music video for a local Philly rocker named Alan Mann. That video for the song “Christmas on the Block”, went on to become the first and perhaps only video by an unsigned artist to play on regular rotation on MTV. Using “Christmas on the Block” as a framing device, Murray illuminates Mann’s larger story - and how he could have, should of and almost did make it, but didn’t because of his excesses, and a tragic accidental death. The film also turns the lens sharply on the film’s director (Murray) and how his own excesses might have resulted in the same tragic trajectory, that but for wisdom and luck, did not.
When a catastrophic stroke destroys the creative half of his brain days before his international breakthrough, a celebrated rebellious Russian performer wakes paralyzed - unable to walk, speak, swallow, or sing. Filmed over several years, WILL POWER follows his fragile and nonlinear rehabilitation as fame fades and his family turns away. What begins as a medical recovery becomes something deeper: a dramatic confrontation with identity, limitation, and choice. Challenging the certainty of prognosis, the film explores the possibility that the boundaries defined by science are not always the limits of human will.
How can a single mushroom become an umbrella of shared prosperity on the Loess Plateau? Umbrellas of Prosperity: Mushroom Bloom on the Loess Plateau follows agricultural scientist Huang Chao, whose lifelong dedication to the Loess Plateau has transformed mushroom cultivation through scientific innovation. The film documents his team’s breakthroughs in converting agricultural waste into valuable growing substrates, developing new mushroom varieties, and transferring technology to local farmers. Their work has revitalized abandoned cave dwellings into productive mushroom farms, turning a humble mushroom into a powerful driver of rural revitalization. More than a documentary about agricultural science, this is a story of perseverance, innovation, and the pursuit of shared prosperity.
