Our two most recent films remind us how essential this work continues to be.
PAINT ME A ROAD OUT OF HERE shows how a single piece of art can become a lifeline, a form of hope, resilience, and justice. As I’ve toured with the film this fall, I’ve learned that audiences don’t just see the painting, they feel the lives it represents, the dignity it insists upon, and the courage it ignites inside a space designed to erase identity.
We are living through a frightening time of deliberate upheaval, one in which cruelty is policy, division is strategy, and punishment is offered as governance. Yet even here, there's opportunity, the chance to scale what we know about how solidarity works, to convert harm into healing, state violence into compassion, and isolation into shared safety. Every action, every conversation, helps rebuild systems rooted in punishment and control into ones grounded in accountability and care.
Our other film, MEANWHILE, a docu-poem in six verses, marks a sea change for me and Aubin. Rather than explaining the world, we invite audiences to feel its fractures. Through the rhythms of image and sound, we evoke rather than document memory, loss, resilience, and hope. We chart geographies of the soul, mapping how inequality lives in the body, and how resistance survives across generations. Viewers are not passive, they're invited into the complexity of living in a world shaped by inequality and endurance, and invited to confront the lasting effects of trauma.
I also want to share two films now nearing completion that will carry us into 2026. THE RETURN, directed by Anjali Kamat and Rehan Ansari, confronts the rise of Hindu extremism and anti-Muslim violence through an intimate story that refuses abstraction and demands moral clarity. Our short film, AND AGAIN I DREAM, follows how Ivy Young’s archives inspired my co-director, Mariah Norman, and how legacy itself can become a tool for survival, continuity, and political imagination.
We're dedicating our 30th year in 2026, to vision, that most powerful form of resistance. And to healing that's collective, to community that's active, and to the ongoing work of demanding, refusing, and dreaming together.
- Catherine Gund
