Somebody experiments with queerness for a night and calls it “fun.” Somebody else is left holding the confusion, the shame, and the fallout. We sit down with filmmaker Louisa Connolly Burnham to talk about Full Fat, a razor-sharp short screening opening night at the Los Angeles Diversity Film Festival, and we get honest about the emotional consequences that can land on queer people when attraction gets treated like a party story instead of a real connection.

Louisa also walks us through the nuts and bolts of independent filmmaking without the traditional path: coming from acting, writing and directing her first short during a career dry patch, raising money through Kickstarter, and committing to the discipline of making a film a year. Plus so much more!

Then we shift to documentary and legacy with Terry Franklin and Jeffrey Moline, whose Love Will Set You Free screens at LADFF as part of Block 2: The Way Through. Terry shares the true family documents that sparked the project: a will contest where enslaved ancestors were treated as property, and a fight over whether a dying man had the right to set them free. We talk about turning that history into a musical, a book, and a documentary performance piece, why art can be an act of resistance, and how building an artistic family through the Turbine Arts Collective keeps the work alive.

Stick around for our Gimme 3 movie picks from each guest! Subscribe, share with a cinephile friend, and leave a review!

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Shout out to contributor and producer Sonja Mereu. A special thanks to Anselm Kennedy for creating Gimme Three's theme music. And another special thanks to Zoe Baumann for creating our exceptional cover art.