Spotlight

"I decided to merge my passions for weightlifting and storytelling."

Ryan Rakes is an award-winning director, editor, and VFX designer, and a long-term vegan strength athlete and trainer. Ironbound, his feature documentary, follows elite plant-based athletes who are rewriting the rules of human performance, a film he has shot and carried entirely on his own across the US, Canada, and Europe for more than a year.

"It shifted the project from documenting memories to uncovering the roots of character."

Kendrick Dean is a Grammy-nominated record producer and songwriter, known as Wyldcard, whose credits include #1 hits for Chris Brown and Mariah Carey. His first documentary, The Man the Island Made, turns the camera on his own father, who grew up on Long Island in the Bahamas, without shoes, schooled under a tree, before immigrating to the United States. What began as a way to preserve an 85-year-old man's stories became, for Kendrick, a search for the roots of his own character.

"Just play with it and get it the way you want it."

Nicky Baker has spent a career being heard and not seen: a British voice actor, singer, and songwriter who worked in Paris for twenty-two years before settling in Florida.

"It helps organize the clay, but I still sculpt the film."

Jesús Contreras is a documentary filmmaker and editor, the founder of Wachanos in Beaverton, Oregon, who pays the bills shooting environmental PSAs and civic video and pours the craft into festival documentaries.

“Point the camera at people who are paying attention, and stay long enough for the truth to show up.”

Bill Lange has spent twenty-five years, under the name LightPlusTime, pointing a patient, observational camera at the people quietly protecting Pacific Northwest water, land, and community.

"The camera just goes where the story is. An arena, a stage, a doctor's office. The job is the same."

A.J. Leitch is a Toronto documentary cinematographer and producer, Producer and DP on the award-winning Searching for Satoshi and a 2026 Canadian Screen Award nominee for The Ozempic Effect, whose lens moves from sports floors to music stages to luxury hotels to one of the decade's biggest health stories.

"Having a camera in your hand is like having a passport on purpose."

Justin Yau is a New Zealand storyteller and the founder and executive producer of StoryBites, who came to filmmaking by way of audiology and a youth pastor, and built his craft on listening: care deeply about people, tell their stories sincerely, and trust follows.

"My unwavering belief in the transformative power of storytelling fuels my passion."

Isaac Marumo is a Botswana writer, director, and cinematographer who founded Quihaba Pictures and moved to the Okavango Delta to film its wildlife and the stories of his home.

"My drug is really seeing people's eyes light up when the camera is rolling."

Devin Fei-Fan Tau is a Portland documentary filmmaker who makes films about silenced stories, from Japanese American incarceration in Sansei Sensibility to the lives history tried to erase. Intimate, interview-driven work about silence, resilience, and what gets carried forward.

"I use my background to bridge the gap between complex technology and compelling storytelling."

Tony Strader is a Cincinnati creative leader in video, web design, and UI/UX, and the editor of the short film The Angle, whose path runs from teaching at-risk kids to build websites to award-winning storytelling. A maker who still cannot stop building, on screen or off.

"Be patient and consistent. Once you have built something, others will support you, and it gets easier."

Sergio Miranda started as a reality-TV assistant editor and built Serril Media, the post house behind work for Netflix, HBO, Discovery, and Hulu, into a family business he runs with his wife, April. A patient craftsman who oversees post from DIT to final delivery, leans on The Four Agreements when the work gets stressful, and meets new tools with curiosity instead of hype.

"Creativity is born. Technical is taught. But the work doesn't happen without both."

Kevin Parkinson built an indie studio out of a college dorm room, weathered a national watchlist that ended his teaching career, and has been editing the whole time. The tools keep changing. The question hasn't.

“I've been doing this for forty years. The work still surprises me”

Stephen Eckelberry started cutting film by hand on a Moviola. He has watched his craft die and be reborn a half-dozen times since. He's still here, still curious, still chasing the story.