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Talkhouse

Georgia Bernstein is a Los Angeles-based writer, director and producer. Her debut feature, <a href="https://www.independentfilmco.com/films/night-nurse" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Night Nurse</a>, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and is out now in theaters through IFC. The erotic thriller, set in a retirement community, explores the compulsive side of caregiving. At Sundance, Night Nurse was named one of IndieWire’s Top 5 Best First Features and included in the Los Angeles Times’ festival favorites. (Photo by Lindsey Kusterman, courtesy Sundance Institute.)

Georgia Bernstein

Film

The Numb Stage of Nymphomania

Lauren Caster is a writer, director, and actor based in Los Angeles, deeply connected to Southern California. Raised by a lesbian mother who conceived her through an anonymous sperm donor, Lauren is committed to telling LGBTQ+ stories, reflecting her personal journey and the diverse family structures she grew up with. Her semi-autobiographical feature film debut, <a href="https://rhythmisadancer.utopia.film/buy-tickets?utm_source=ig&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_content=link_in_bio" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rhythm is a Dancer</a>, in which she stars opposite Amy Aquino and Tate Donovan, plays the Roxy Cinema in New York City on July 16 and 17. Her filmmaking journey began with her short film Donor Baby, which was picked up by Amazon. This success led to additional shorts, Plan C and Becoming, creating opportunities such as a development deal with Lifetime after winning The Wrap’s Pitchfest for emerging female filmmakers. Lauren later served as associate producer on Lifetime&#8217;s You&#8217;re Not Supposed To Be Here, a story she wrote, which was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Movie (Streaming or TV).

Lauren Caster

The Stories We Invent Before We Have Language

Kimmy Gatewood is an Emmy Award-winning actor, writer and director whose latest feature as director, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descendants:_Wicked_Wonderland">Descendants: Wicked Wonderland</a>, premieres on the Disney Channel on July 16, and will be available to stream on Disney+ from July 17. She got her start as an actor, performing improv comedy at the UCB Theatre in New York City, and her first documentary feature film, Nerdcore Rising, about the rise of nerdcore hip-hop, premiered at SXSW in 2008. She went on to direct many acclaimed series like Girls5eva, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Single Drunk Female, Timeline, Ghosts, Up Here and The Big Leap. She won a 2021 Daytime Emmy for Best Directing for her work on Sesame Street, was nominated for directing Emmys for Baby-Sitter’s Club and Muppets Mayhem. Her feature directorial debut Good on Paper, starring Iliza Shlesinger, premiered in Netflix’s top 10 in summer 2021. She also directed Patti Harrison and Tim Hedeicker in Team Coco’s audio movie My Guy Died, streaming on Audible. She was most recently the producing director for Season 2 of Fox’s Going Dutch, starring Denis Leary. You may also recognize her from her on-screen role as Coach Crowley on Netflix’s series Atypical and Stacey on Netflix’s critically acclaimed series GLOW. (Photo by David Astorga / Disney.)

Kimmy Gatewood

What I Learned Directing My First Franchise Film

Actor and singer-songwriter’s Alicia Witt’s forthcoming album <a href="https://30tgrs.ffm.to/betweenheavenandearth" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Between Heaven and Earth</a>, is out August 28 via Thirty Tigers. Produced by Joe Henry, the album was inspired by filmmaker David Lynch, whose four-decade friendship and creative relationship with Witt shaped its exploration of love, intuition, fate, grief and the unseen connections that bind people across time. The second single from the album, &#8220;Freeze Frame,&#8221; is out now. Witt has been acting since the age of seven, when she made her film debut in David Lynch’s sci fi classic Dune. Her many screen credits include Showtime’s third season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and films such as Two Weeks’ Notice, Last Holiday, The Upside of Anger, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Urban Legend, Four Rooms, 88 Minutes, Urban Legend and Vanilla Sky. Long celebrated for her work as both an actor and musician, Witt has released multiple acclaimed albums, performed around the world – including at Nashville&#8217;s Grand Ole Opry – and opened for Ben Folds Five, Rachel Platten, Bob Schneider, Jimmy Webb, and John Fulbright. A classically trained pianist, her music has been described as “sharply personal, boldly melodic pop originals” by the Philadelphia Inquirer, while Broadway World praised her “rangy, honeyed voice, clear as crystal, pretty as a stained-glass window,” calling her “a voice to treasure.” Witt also spent five weeks on Billboard&#8217;s Top 30 Adult Contemporary chart with the 2021 piano power ballad &#8220;Chasing Shadows,&#8221; from her self-co-produced album The Conduit. (Photo by David McClister.)

Alicia Witt

On Being Fired

Zachary Ray Sherman is an actor, director, writer, and producer from Portland, Oregon, whose new film <a href="https://tubitv.com/movies/100022519/all-that-fall" target="_blank" rel="noopener">All That Fall</a> is now streaming. After early success opposite Kirsten Dunst in Lifetime’s Fifteen and Pregnant, and as Jasper on the CW’s reboot of 90210, Sherman has gone on to build an impressive acting resume balancing television work (Netflix’s Everything Sucks!) with edgy roles in independent films (Archie’s Final Project, West Virginia Stories, Cuck). Sherman has also directed three feature films to date: Particular Crowd and Mar Vista’s upcoming Do You Hear What I Hear, the award-winning indie All That Fall and HBO’s Young Hearts, a sweet and touching coming-of-age film executive-produced by the Duplass brothers. He will soon be seen in the indie dramas The Send-Off, produced by Glenn Howerton, and Can’t Seem to Make You Mine, opposite Lindsay Burdge, and is currently starring in Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven starring Andrew Garfield, created by Dustin Lance Black from the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, and executive-produced by Jason Bateman and Brian Grazer. (Photo by David Zaugh.)

Zachary Ray Sherman

When Art Finally Catches Up to You

Anthony Frith is a writer and director with a love for absurd pop-culture anomalies. His work has taken him to Boston, where he studied the art of churning out novelty songs with cult musician Matt Farley in Lessons From A Middle Class Artist; to Burbank, where he made his feature debut directing a trashy dinosaur movie for the legendary studio the Asylum in <a href="https://www.mockbustermovie.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mockbuster</a>, which is in theaters from July 10 through Giant Pictures. You can usually find Anthony deep in the rabbit holes of internet folklore, always on the hunt for strange stories from the fringes of pop culture.

Anthony Frith

What I Learned Making The Land That Time Forgot (and Mockbuster!) in Six Days

Advik Beni is a South African filmmaker and curator currently based in Los Angeles whose new film, mother, you have not died yet. but you will. and when you do, you will finally be alive again, world premieres on July 9 at <a href="https://fidmarseille.org/en/festivals/festival-37/films/mother-you-have-not-died-yet-but-you-will-and-when-you-do-you-will-finally-be-alive-again" target="_blank" rel="noopener">FIDMarseille</a>. Through a practice steeped in South African traditions of orality, their work aims to create imagined spaces for marginalized people to express grief and trauma. They are interested in how these non-hierarchical, hybrid models of filmmaking can encourage a collective mutability amongst rhizomatic pathways – that may lead to an actuality of positive impact on communities; whilst preserving a cultural tradition eclipsed by Western modes of storytelling. Advik is focused on how we can witness each other’s existence, and all that entails, in an attempt to facilitate a tangibility of cross-border solidarity that prioritizes care. Their work has been supported by San Sebastián International Film Festival, Sundance, Prismatic Ground, New Orleans Film Festival, Flaherty Film Seminar, Points North Institute and the Edinburgh International Film Festival amongst others.

Advik Beni

The Things We Carry Home

Sasha Waters is director, producer and editor of the new documentary <a href="https://kinolorber.com/film/mary-oliver-saved-by-the-beauty-of-the-world" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World</a>, which opens through Kino Lorber on July 3, and the 2018 doc Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, which was released theatrically by Greenwich Entertainment. Born in Brooklyn in 1968, Sasha makes non-fiction films about outsiders, misfits and everyday radicals. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and video. Past projects have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Rotterdam, Tribeca, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Pacific Film Archive, as well as on the Sundance Channel and international cable and public television. She is the Chair of the Department of Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University, the #1 public college of art in the U.S. (Image by Steven Cassanova for VCUarts.)

Sasha Waters

Searching for That Missing Element

Malin Barr is a Swedish director, writer, and actor working between Los Angeles and Stockholm. Her directorial debut, the short film <a href="https://www.malinbarr.com/work" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sauna Sickness</a>, premiered in competition at Sundance Film Festival 2026, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. A darkly comedic psychological drama-thriller that explores self-doubt, manipulative love, and self-preservation, it follows a young woman whose romantic New Year’s getaway with her boyfriend in the mountains turns into an icy nightmare when they accidentally lock themselves out in the cold. As an actor, her recent credits include the Netflix series Bad Thoughts and the upcoming feature El Tigre, and her previous work includes Honeydew, starring opposite Sawyer Spielberg, as well as The Beta Test and A Wounded Fawn. Malin is bilingual in Swedish and English, and also speaks French.

Malin Barr

Never as Alone as We Think We Are

Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer whose latest film, <a href="https://www.thefilmcollaborative.org/films/stateoffirsts" target="_blank" rel="noopener">State of Firsts</a>, about Rep. Sarah McBride, is playing in theaters across the US from June 26. His documentary features The Nest (with Julietta Singh) and State of Firsts both premiered in 2025, at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively. His documentary feature Framing Agnes was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. The film has played more than 100 festivals internationally and is distributed by Kino Lorber. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing. He is the co-author of three non-fiction books, including the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice with Mike Hoolboom and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. His latest book, Vantage Points, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle. (Photo by Amos Mac.)

Chase Joynt

A Trans Lens, a Cinema of Defiance

Ash Mayfair&#8216;s new feature, <a href="https://www.filmmovementplus.com/videos/skin-of-youth-trailer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Skin of Youth</a>, an all-consuming love story between a transgender singer and a dog-cage fighter set in 1990s Saigon, Vietnam, is out now on Film Movement Plus from June 26. She was born in Vietnam and educated in the UK and the US. Ash received a BA from Oxford University for English Literature, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London for theatre directing and received an MFA in filmmaking at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her first feature, The Third Wife, was released by Film Movement in 2019 and is now available through leading digital platforms and Film Movement Plus. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the NETPAC Jury Award, and also won awards at the San Sebastian, Milano, Chicago, Minsk, Kolkata and Cairo film festivals.

Ash Mayfair

Transgender / Transcendence

Avalon Fast’s new film <a href="https://darkskyfilms.com/film/camp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CAMP</a> hits theaters on June 26. They hail from Vancouver Island, BC, and their first film, Honeycomb, which was selected for the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival and went on to screen at Boston Underground, Calgary Underground, Etheria LA, Fantasia, and many more. In 2026, they premiered Drinking and Driving &#8211; co-directed, co-starring, and co-written with Jillian Frank &#8211; at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. In addition to writing and directing, Fast recently starred in Louise Weard’s cultural breakout trans DIY epic Castration Movie Anthology, co-starred in prolific young filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay’s sapphic horror The Serpent’s Skin, and appeared in Jane Schoenbrun’s recent Cannes sensation Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

film essay