In this episode of the 1st on Film Podcast, we sit down with the creative team behind Dead Deer High — director Jo Rochelle, writer/producer Joshua Roark, and cinematographer Anup Kulkarni — to discuss their powerful new drama about grief, healing, poetry, and finding your voice after tragedy.

Dead Deer High follows a once-brilliant high school slam poetry team and their English teacher one year after a tragedy changes their school forever. As the students prepare for a national poetry competition, they must confront their individual and collective trauma while their teacher struggles to find the courage to return to the classroom.

Jo Rochelle is a Jamaican-American screenwriter and filmmaker based in California and originally from Minneapolis. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Rochelle began her career in education as a Teach for America teacher, teaching sixth-grade English and Social Studies in the Mississippi Delta. She later transitioned into film and television, writing on multiple seasons of the Freeform/Hulu series Good Trouble. Her feature directorial debut, Jasmine Is a Star, screened at festivals including Urbanworld and BlackStar and won the Audience Award for Best Film at Sidewalk Film Festival. Dead Deer High marks her second feature and had its world premiere at SXSW 2026.

Joshua Roark is a poet, screenwriter, producer, and educator whose work frequently explores teaching, young people, and the power of words. Roark earned an MFA in Poetry and has published poetry including Put One Hand Up, Lean Back, a collection inspired by his experiences teaching middle school as a Teach for America teacher. He originally conceived Dead Deer High as a play during the pandemic before adapting it into the feature screenplay. He subsequently produced the film alongside his wife and frequent creative collaborator, Jo Rochelle.

Anup Kulkarni is an Indian-born cinematographer and VFX supervisor working in the U.S. film industry. A graduate of the New York Film Academy’s cinematography program, Kulkarni has worked across feature films, television, commercials, documentaries, and visual effects, with credits including Life of Pi, Thor: The Dark World, Percy Jackson, and R.I.P.D. His cinematography has earned multiple awards, and his work has been showcased at festivals including Cannes and SXSW. For Dead Deer High, Kulkarni served as director of photography, developing a visual approach designed to keep audiences emotionally close to the characters without becoming intrusive.