These days, they're leaving the way lions do, unhurried, with the grass still rendering their heft. Gloria Steinem, who embodied the wisdom of one candle lighting many other flames. Yayoi Kusama, whose polka-dotted world taught us to question where our own bodies end and the universe begins. Dolly Parton, who turned rhinestones into armor and never once let anyone mistake her softness for surrender. Robin Morgan who expanded the conversation of women connecting across imagery, ocean, expression, and home. And Doris Eva Lundy Martin, mother to a poet, its own kind of lineage, the quiet architecture behind every fierce sentence her daughter Dawn has gone on to forge. A woman who is, in this way, already living in shared language. They're joining the parade, with Johanna Fernández, Betye Saar, Ivy Young, Aggie, and Toni Morrison, forever present.
What connects them isn't fame or even its absence, it's that each of them, in her own register, refused to be small when smallness was handed to her as the only, or at most the safer, choice. They metabolized their eras instead of just surviving them. And when women like this leave our plane of existence, they don't vanish, they leave their shape in the grass, holding them with us. The light shifts. We grow sturdier because we have to. The inheritance is never grief alone but the standing instruction to keep the grass from closing back over the paths they pressed.
-_Catherine Gund |
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Introducing Aubin's new film in progress, UNTIL I'M FREE, directed by Laurence Mathieu Leger. Edited by Flavia Romani, Laurence Mathieu-Leger, Rosella Tursi. Produced by Laurence Mathieu-Leger, Catherine Gund, Ebyan Bihi, Thalia Mavros, Lauren Shafer, and Tyra Patterson. Executive Produced by Agnes Gund, Sara Vance Waddell, and Michele Waddell.
Filmed over eight years, UNTIL I'M FREE is Tyra Patterson’s profound vow. A Black child, wrongfully convicted of murder at nineteen and sentenced to 43 years to life, Tyra served 23 years and walked out of prison on Christmas Day, 2017. But getting out isn’t getting free. Tyra, never exonerated, lives in a vast, uncertain country between captivity and justice, the space before her name is cleared.
At the center of that country is family, those taken from you, those who never let go, and the ones you nurture when no one else is left standing.
Decades of ordinary days were stolen from Tyra and her family, time no one can get back. Her mother welcomes her grown daughter as a peer, but can’t shake the image of her little girl, before. Her brothers, who never served a day inside, waited out the whole sentence anyway, their arms the first to catch her at the gate. Michelle, the girl who was murdered, has a sister Holly, whose letter to the governor finally helped set Tyra free. One family's grief reaches across an impossible distance to loosen a suffocating hold on another woman's life. And Tyra made family behind the bars, with women who knew her in ways blood never could, keeping them close on lifelines society expects her to cut. Blood. Chosen. Inside. Outside. The film doesn't rank them. It simply shows they are all, against odds and still, hers.
With joy, intimacy, and a glowing spirit, Tyra commits to public speaking, advocating, and elevating others still trapped in the system, and then she’s diagnosed with cancer. A mirror of what she already survived. A battle with no clear end. Tyra meets every demand with the same resilience that carried her through prison, the same refusal to let anything define her limits of freedom.
UNTIL I'M FREE asks a question that outlives its subject, what do we call the years spent outside a cage, but not yet free? Through Tyra's unflinching honesty, the film offers something too rarely seen, a woman's interior experience of what survival costs, and what makes it possible, long after a cell door opened but never quite let her go. |
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Upcoming Events & Screenings |
AND AGAIN I DREAM in Washington D.C. |
Aubin's 30th AnniversaryGala Non-Gala |
AND AGAIN I DREAMGreater Cleveland Urban Film Festival |
PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HEREat Roxy Cinema NYC |
Find the DC Screening of AND AGAIN I DREAM onthe 2026 Fall of Freedom Map |
Fall of Freedom (FoF) is a weekend long (Oct 2nd-4th) urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping our nation. FoF is an open invitation to artists, creators, and communities to take part showed the depth of talent and shared commitment to stand up to repression — and to celebrate the experiences, cultures, and identities that shape the fabric of our nation.
Go to falloffreedom.com to find more events across the country or register your own justice-based event. |
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This Sunday, September 13th at 5:30PM, Frontyard FM are hosting a teach-in / concert focused on organizing efforts to close Rikers.
Frontyard FM is a grassroots music collective based in Brooklyn that focuses on fostering intergenerational community, collective joy, and supporting local aid through music. They host public concerts and dance parties, free political education events, and mutual aid fundraisers. |
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The Summer Hikaru Died is a horror and coming of age manga (Japanese comic) about a young boy, Yoshiki, who discovers his best friend, Hikaru, has been replaced by a mysterious and possibly dangerous entity. It explores themes of growing up in a small town, questioning long-held traditions, and the meaning of love. “Hikaru” can also be translated as “light” - alternative titles include Hikaru Ga Shinda Natsu and The Summer Light Died.
The final chapter will be released this October, so now is the perfect time to catch up! You can also watch the anime adaptation (which covers the first 26 chapters of the series) on |
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Some of Our Films andWhere to Find Them |
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In 1995, artists Catherine Lord and Millie Wilson committed what they called "an act of anthropology", and they intended it to be doomed from the start. For a large mixed-media exhibition on lesbian culture at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, they asked 83 individuals from around the state of New Mexico to lend one small object of personal significance to the museum for display. Not just lesbians. Women willing to be identified as lesbians. Women who were once lesbians. Women who prefer not to describe themselves as lesbians. Women who entertain the idea of being a lesbian. And men wishing to commemorate a lesbian. The objects arrived. The show opened. And the category dissolved on contact.
.......Visibility is not safety. But erasure is violence. The space between those two truths is where this film lives. |
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Originally aired on Independent Lens, and nominated for Best Documentary Emmy, A TOUCH OF GREATNESS (2004) is a bolt of lightning disguised as a documentary. Director Leslie Sullivan and producer Catherine Gund train their lens on Albert Cullum, a force-of-nature elementary school teacher who blew the roof off Rye, New York public schools by handing Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Whitman directly to seven-year-olds and compelling them to feel it.
The film's secret weapon is its ravishing, grain-soaked 16mm black-and-white film shot in 1964 by the legendary Robert Downey Sr.; images so alive and strange they feel like they were smuggled out of another dimension.
Woven through the archival material are TV broadcast fragments from the era and deeply emotional contemporary interviews with Cullum himself and the now-grown, devoted students whose lives he permanently altered. Together they make the case that one radical, wildly imaginative teacher is an act of historical consequence. |
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“This is, indeed, poetry.” - The New York Times
“A gorgeous, quietly energetic, and moving meditation..” - The New Yorker |
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Frame by Frame: 30 Years of Magicwhat you can expect |
2026 is an exciting year for Aubin as we celebrate our 30th Anniversary!
Our 30th Anniversary programming includes screenings, convenings, celebrations, and more! We are celebrating our work across our FIVE PILLARS: Studio (documentary filmmaking to transform narratives); Impact (justice-oriented campaigns to amplify urgent issues); Workshop (fiscal sponsorship, project incubation, and community events); Lab (mentorship and training); and Rewind (uncovering and activating our past work and shared history).
Over the course of this year, we are working to inspire, learn, and scale Aubin Pictures’s model for storytelling for social change in its next 30 years.
Help us launch our Aubin 30 campaign by watching this wonderful sizzle reel of the amazing work that the Aubin team has been able to accomplish since 1996! |
Aubin 30 Sizzle Reel with clips from more than 20 of our films! |
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