Confluence Fellowship

The Confluence Fellowship is a biannual artist support program organized by True/False Film Fest for Midwest based nonfiction filmmakers.

The program is a project-based fellowship for directors based in the Midwest who are in development on their first feature-length nonfiction film. The Confluence Fellowship aims to support emerging voices in nonfiction filmmaking in the Midwest by creating a nurturing space for projects to connect with the wider film community.

The Confluence Fellowship is supported by Concordia, a studio created to help finance, develop, produce, and deliver the most compelling stories with today’s
forward-thinking creators.

2025

2023

2025 FELLOWS

2023 FELLOWS

Joua Lee Grande’s work highlights marginalized voices and undertold stories. Her films have been supported by Kartemquin Films, Jerome Foundation, Center for Asian American Media and more. Her short On All Fronts received an Honorable Mention for CAAMFest’s Loni Ding Award for Social Justice Documentary. She is a Confluence Fellow (2023) and Jerome Artist Fellow (2021-23). Joua was previously an editor for television news and a community worker supporting marginalized storytellers and families in nonprofits.

Moore recently participated in UnionDocs Documentary Lab in Brooklyn, NY. Her collaborative and video work has been hosted internationally at venues like The Momentary, FotoFocus Biennial, Aesthetica Film Festival, Borscht Film Festival, The Armory Show, Pratt Institute, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the New Art Center, among others.”

Spirited

Like many young Hmong Americans, a filmmaker searches to reconnect with her community’s shamanic traditions while working to build connections across racial, cultural and generational lines. As an agnostic woman chosen to become a shaman, she must determine whether or not she will follow the path and whether or not she has a choice.

Tommy Franklin is a filmmaker, writer, producer, creator of Weapon of Choice Podcast and Special Menu Productions. Tommy is a 2020 Sundance Short Documentary Film Fund Grantee, 2020 Kartemquin Diverse Voices in Docs Fellow, 2020 SPNN New Angle Docu Fellow, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council 2020 Next Step Awardee, a 2021 Jerome Foundation Film Production Grantee, and was a finalist for the 2021 Sundance Episodic Lab. He was a 2022 Sundance BIPOC Mentorship Program Mentee and a 2022 Film Independent + CNN Original Series Docuseries Intensive Fellow. Tommy was a founding board member of All Square, is a founding board member of the Ostara Initiative, and is a creative and communications consultant at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). He made three off-the-wall narrative short films, and he collaborates in philanthropic and grassroots organizing communities to produce nonfiction content he believes in, indiscriminate in form or medium. A survivor of incarceration (born in prison and having served time in adulthood), Franklin works along creative culture lines to radically reimagine power structures, focusing on Black liberation.

You Don't Know My Name

After being separated from his incarcerated mother at birth, Tommy Franklin searches for her identity while uncovering deep ancestral bloodlines. As he gets closer to this life-altering truth, he must navigate his way through systems designed to keep him in the dark.

Erin Semine Kökdil is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and educator interested in building solidarity and inciting social change through film. Her work explores issues of home, identity, motherhood, migration, and belonging, and has screened at IDFA, Hot Docs, Camden International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, AFI Docs, Palm Springs International ShortFest, among others. Her work has been supported by SFFILM, National Geographic, Points North Institute, Mountainfilm and Fulbright, and featured on The New Yorker, KQED, and Means TV. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, she worked extensively with non-profits and community-led initiatives in the U.S. and Guatemala. She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and Spanish from Smith College and an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University. She is the recipient of a 2020 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship.

Untitled Santa Cruz Chinautla Documentary

The indigenous Maya Poqomam community of Santa Cruz Chinautla, Guatemala is facing an eco-ethnocide. Illegal and invasive sand mining combined with uncontrolled garbage overflow from a nearby landfill present a dual-environmental crisis that’s reached a tipping point. Determined to take back their community, the people rise up in a pacific resistance to protect their land before it’s too late.

Desireé Moore is a time-based artist whose work stretches storytelling constructs through the use of media technologies. Her work is rooted in observation aimed at understanding the magical fallibility of memory and individual behavioral responses to social influence around themes of gender and loss. Currently based in Columbia, MO, she works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri.

Work In Progress

Denied the space to simply grieve, director Desireé Moore becomes a modern, mad scientist driven to reanimate the technological remains of her deceased lover.

Texas Smith (they/he) grew up in a town without a movie theater. Now, Texas is a Chicago-based, Arkansas filmmaker whose documentary and narrative work has screened across the US at festivals like Chicago International (Honorable Mention), Atlanta Film Festival, and Doc NYC as well as on music publications like Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan.

Make No Mistake

Florida band Home Is Where headlines their first tour in support of their sophomore album, “The Whaler”. While the group navigates the tour’s day-to-day, they must also reckon with what it means to be led by two Trans women traveling around their home as it becomes increasingly less hospitable.

Hao Zhou (they/them) is an Ohio-based filmmaker originally from Southwest China. Their films include narrative and nonfiction works, often exploring queer and feminist themes in underrepresented regions. An alum of Berlinale Talents, Zhou has screened films at the Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, SXSW, and other venues.

All fixed up

Navigating life between the rural U.S. Midwest and China, Hao agrees to participate in a complicated masquerade, seeking a path to emotional healing in the face of a tense future.

Saelyx Finna (she/they) is a dream-centric filmmaker and writer based in Akron, Ohio. They are the former artistic and executive director for Northwest Film Forum, the independent film center in Seattle. Saelyx is founder and principal at Context Moves, a consultancy specializing in film distribution and impact producing. As an artist and researcher in the emerging space of dream neurotech, Saelyx has published and presented on the neuroethics of dream tech, and received the inaugural Creative Science Nonfiction Accelerator Award from Sandbox Films and Gamechanger Films for Under the Dream.

Under the Dream

Under the Dream is a work of somatic cinema about the stakes for the future of our minds at night.

Jason Rhee (he/him) is a Korean American filmmaker with a passion for telling stories rooted in his childhood and the AAPI community. With a background in screenwriting and comedy, he produced three one-woman shows with comedian Kellye Howard, including directing a sold-out run at the Steppenwolf Theater as part of its 2022 LookOut series. Additionally, Jason is a cinematographer, most recently for PBS WTTW’s “Firsthand” series, which covers topics like migration, peacekeeping, and homelessness.

EJ Lee: All-American

EJ Lee, a Louisiana legend nicknamed by Sports Illustrated as the “Korean Magic Johnson of NCAA women’s basketball,” has been overlooked her entire career. But finally, at the age of 60, EJ receives her first opportunity to become a college head coach and lead an underdog team of young women in West Texas.