The 2025 Story
Kashif just turned four years old! As we mark this milestone, we're looking back on a year that tested and proved what we've always believed: relationship is infrastructure. In 2025, we launched our most intensive program to date, The Directing Breakdown, hosted a week-long lab at the Public Theater, supported breakthrough films that went on to festival wins, and gathered our community over tacos and drag performances because joy is also resistance. When everything around us said contract, we expanded. When the moment demanded isolation, we gathered. This is the story of how we are, together.
But before we share what we built in community, we need to name what made it possible: the work we did within our own walls. We've always believed that what we practice internally becomes what we can offer externally. 2025 was the year we deepened that practice. Together & Through has been with us since 2022, holding space for our organizational growth. In 2025, that partnership reached new depths -- we learned about ourselves as individuals, as an organization, our interdependence, and how our values show up in practice. We understand that liberation work starts at home. The programs, partnerships, and gatherings you'll read about in these pages... this is what relationship as infrastructure looks like.
So give it a read, it’s smooth like buttah.
The Directing Breakdown emerged directly from conversations with our community of directors who were ready to create but needed the language and tools to translate their ideas to collaborators. We created a program reflecting what they asked for: the confidence to bring others fully inside their vision. Rooted in Kashif's signature storytelling guidance, the program centers the director's voice while expanding how that voice travels from script to rehearsal room to set.
Over six months, Kashif worked with six emerging directors alongside mentors who brought decades of industry experience and deep care for the craft. Together, they explored rehearsal, blocking, camerawork, and the often-unspoken skill of communicating vision clearly and creatively to actors and crew. One director, Shenny De Los Angeles, described the impact on their process:
Working with Kashif has consistently left me feeling stronger as an artist and much clearer about my next goals. [In the Directing Breakdown] I felt that I could show my full self, even cry if I needed to, and still move forward. That kind of freedom is a beautiful and radical way of creating. This is a space where you get to see everyone else express themselves authentically as well.
The program culminated in a week-long, in-person lab at the iconic Public Theater in New York City, where each director filmed an original scene from their script. We witnessed six people walk into that space uncertain and walk out transformed, ideas on the page becoming scenes that lived and breathed, made with real collaborators in real time.
Watch for their stories on our website and Instagram in the coming months -- directors speaking in their own words about what shifted, what clicked, what became possible. This was the first iteration of The Directing Breakdown. It won't be the last.
Festival Season
We show up to film festivals to honor the work of organizers who have been creating space for filmmakers, sometimes for decades, often with limited resources, doing essential work that paves the way for organizations like ours to exist. Connecting with these organizers, their audiences, and their artists is how we learn, how we contribute, and how we stay accountable to our lineage.
2025 marked our third year of partnership with ImagineNative, and each year the relationship deepens. We've moved from attendance to active collaboration—supporting filmmakers through year-round labs, co-sponsoring panels, and building the kind of bonds that show up in unexpected places. When our Founder and ImagineNative's ED shared a stage at OTV's Brave Futures convening, it reflected how these festival relationships become part of the larger ecosystem we're all building together.
This year brought something special: Raven Two Feathers (Cherokee, Seneca, Cayuga, Comanche), one of our reverse mentors*, attended ImagineNative in person for the first time and spoke on a panel about rest that we co-sponsored. Read Raven's reflection HERE. *reverse mentorship is a paid opportunity that allows the founding partners to connect with, learn from, and align directly with the communities, artists, and filmmakers who have been most impacted by the unequal distribution of resources, power, and economic opportunity in the film and media landscape.
Also for the third year, we co-sponsored BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, and for the second year running, we gathered our community at Unified Frames Brunch with Open Television. If festivals are a beautiful sprint -- screenings, panels, conversations flying by -- brunch is where we catch our breath. The Philadelphia Horticultural Society's funky South Street garden became our refuge, a space to share food and stories, to see each other fully instead of in passing. People linger. Conversations deepen. By the time we leave we remember: this work isn't just about what we're building on screen, it's about who we're building with.
In Celebration
Y’all know we love a good kiki! Our first ever Kashif Kiki happened in May at long-standing Brooklyn neighborhood bar, Chilo’s (which sadly closed in Sept). We feasted on tacos and great conversation and it was just what we needed to get us into the vibes of spring. We hosted our second holiday kiki at the end of the year at All Night Skate, complete with drag performances and neon. Stay reading these newsletters to learn about the next one.
Chanelle's reflection on OTVs anniversary celebration -
Open Television celebrated their 10th anniversary with Beyond the Screen, a convening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago that brought the ecosystem to life in ways that felt both expansive and foundational. Walking into that space, watching a femme, dripping in dapper elegance, stride through the doors, I knew immediately: I was exactly where I belonged. OTV had built something rare yet indicative of what's emerging across the field: a gathering where care, substantive conversation, and intentional programming weren't aspirations but practice. Every panel, every transition, every choice reflected years of building with intention. Being welcomed into this work by Elijah McKinnon and the OTV team felt like recognition, not just of Kashif, but of what we're building and where we're headed. This is the ecosystem we're part of now. This is the lineage we're accountable to. And this gathering made clear: this is where we're meant to be.
As we start 2026, Kashif joined a coalition of artists, funders, and platforms at Sundance Film Festival for the inaugural Solidarity House convening. "Building on over a decade of coalition work at Sundance, this gathering strengthened collective capacity to imagine and build the future of independent storytelling. At a time when the field is rethinking its relationships to power, technology, and sustainability, Solidarity House created space for meaningful alignment—where imagination meets infrastructure, and solidarity becomes strategy." Kashif participated on a panel on care and sustainability as core storytelling practices, and a recap of this inspirational and necessary gathering is coming soon.
Non Profit Production Support
In March, we supported our friends at Justice For My Sister—an organization led by queer women of color who are survivors of gender-based violence and use filmmaking as a tool for healing and liberation. Part of the Justice For My People Film Festival is a lab that invites BIPOC writers to imagine futures where our communities are centered as leaders, using ancestral wisdom and speculative storytelling to paint pathways to liberation. It's the kind of work that matters: sci-fi that doesn't erase us, but instead places us at the center of tomorrow.
Beyond Survival, the documentary we executive-produced in partnership with Women & Justice Project, and in association with Survivors Justice Project (SJP), won “Best Documentary” at Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival before going on to screen behind the walls of California’s prisons as an official selection of the San Quentin Film Festival. Throughout the year, SJP has organized local and national screenings for community groups, policymakers, academic institutions, and organizers. Inspired by New York’s DVSJA, advocates in several states have either won campaigns or are working on efforts to enact sentencing reform for survivors, including Georgia, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, and Louisiana.
Production Support
We supported filmmaker Oanh-Nhi Nguyen’s short film Little Bird. The film went on to be accepted to Cinequest Film Festival where it won the Jury Award for best short film. This is our second grant in support of Oanh-Nhi’s work and we are so happy that this year she was also accepted into Indeed’s and Hillman Grad’s Rising Voices program in support of BIPOC filmmakers who are reimaging the future of work.
We also supported Kashif collaborator Imani Dennison’s Gospel Be the Glory in My Grandmother's Kitchen, a hybrid documentary that explores Black Appalachian foodways through the life and legacy of poet and cook Crystal Wilkinson. Drawing from the themes of her acclaimed book Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, Wilkinson invites us into her kitchen, where the spirits of her ancestors—her "kitchen ghosts"—speak through the food, memory, and rituals of the South. The grant enabled Imani to create a teaser trailer in order to attend a pitch competition and be able to raise funds for the full-length project. Gospel Be the Glory in my Grandmother's Kitchen is currently in pre-production.
Below are reflections from other artists we supported, in their own words:
From Annalise Lockhart –
Ashley & Walter, my gothic horror short film, is currently in post-production. We’re working through the edit now, and we have a sound designer lined up for this spring. We filmed over three beautiful perfect-weather days in October in the Catskills. A production grant from Kashif made completing principal photography possible, and I just feel so grateful for the support from the community.
From Shrihari Sathe –
My production, Nomad Shadow, with writer-director Eimi Imanishi had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in the Centerpiece section. Our cast and crew came from over 10 nationalities -- it truly took a global village to make this debut fiction feature film set in Western Sahara, Morocco, and Spain. The support from Kashif couldn't have come at a more critical time in our post-production process. With Kashif's support we were able to get a few more weeks of editing to get the film to where it needed to be as well as cover some other post-production expenses as we raced to finish the film for TIFF. We're looking forward to bringing the film to audiences around the world via film festivals and wider distribution.
From Adesola Thomas –
With the support of Kashif’s $5K production grant, I comfortably entered production for my magical realist family drama, Sister Salad Days. This grant helped me offer competitive rates to my 25+ person crew of GA-based freelance production workers, many of whom had been out of work for months in the wake of WGA and SAG strikes. I extended a travel stipend and per diem to our only non-GA based actor Sope Aluko (Black Panther, Parks and Recreation) who traveled from Miami for the project. Finally, with the funds, I submitted and saw my film programmed at the Lincoln Center (New York African Film Festival), Metrograph (25 New Faces of Independent Film Showcase), and the New Orleans Film Festival. Ultimately, Sister Salad Days was honored with awards like "Best Afrofuturist Short" (Afrofuturist Femmes Film Festival), "Best Women’s Emancipation Film" (Seattle Indie Film Festival) and "Best Georgia Short "(Atlanta Film Festival). To my delight, the latter of these awards earned me a two-year long residence with the Atlanta Film Society where I am currently their Filmmaker in Residence.
From Katie Yamasaki –
I had never thought my stories would live beyond the page. I mean, how lucky am I that I get to make books for young readers in the first place? The grant from Kashif has lit a fire under me to transform my first book, Fish For Jimmy, into an animated short and I am well on my way. Now more than ever, we need extremely accessible, entertaining stories for children that teach the true history of this country so we can contextualize our current moment and move through it with wisdom, care, and urgency. Kashif opened up my eyes to what my books could become and I can’t wait for the story to take shape on the big screen.
Da Community Continues…
Community Conversations brought us together monthly to tackle the real questions: How do I set creative goals and keep them? How do I budget a project when money is tight? What makes a pitch deck actually work? Your questions set the agenda and we figure it out together. If there's a topic you're wrestling with, tell us. We're building our 2026 calendar, and your questions shape what we explore next. Stay connected here for the latest convo announcements.
A LOOK AHEAD!
The last four years have inspired us at Kashif. We’ve witnessed how deeply connected we can become with courageous, community-driven storytelling. We hope to motivate you to keep writing and daring to share your stories.
In March, we’re unveiling Screenplay For The People, Kashif’s first screenplay prize. We will honor a number of short screenplays with cash awards and one emerging storyteller with a production award to make their film in 2027. Judges, prizes, and production!
Submissions open March 1st.
Between now and March:
- Follow us on Instagram. Join our newsletter if you haven't already. Tell every writer you know to do the same. This is how you'll know when Screenplay For The People officially opens and how to submit.
- If you've got an idea, start writing! If you've got a draft, keep writing!
Write da damn ting! Percolate and create, do whatever gets you to the page. And when you need to regulate your nervous system and convene with your characters, check out Shabaka Hutchings "Afrikan Culture," they’ll get you there.
March is closer than you think!
