Sista Brunch

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the last of fifteen conversations from that day. Actor, writer, and director Tish Arana sits down with development and production executive Kimber Smith. They begin where everyone at the celebration began — comparing how they each found their way to Fanshen. Kimber through Project Involve at Film Independent, where they were both on the producing track. Tish through One Drop of Love, which moved her enough that she brought her husband back to see it and left with a name for the daughter they'd go on to raise, now ten. Tish also shares how she came to direct her short film The Burden after her director stepped away two weeks before production, with an all-Black-women team of department heads behind her, and how it turned her into a director. Kimber closes the day with a message for the next generation: you will have every reason to doubt whether you belong, and the resistance you meet is itself the proof that they know you do. Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch. Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network. Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles. Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the fourteenth of fifteen conversations from that day. Actor, writer, and producer Lanett Tachel sits down with actor and producer Hari Williams for her first Sista Brunch. Lanett describes the moment she felt most seen: Angie's Cure, made with her team at New Breed Entertainment and shot across South LA and Leimert Park with everything they had, entered at Dances With Films on the last possible day because they had little faith in festival politics. It won the grand jury prize, and she's been invited back as a voice for the festival since, which is the part that stayed with her. On craft, she explains how to deliver the medicine in any genre without being heavy-handed, as long as the characters are real. Hari reflects on storytelling's power to leave an audience better than it found them, and what the human vision means as new technologies reshape how work gets made. Lanett's series Toxic-ish, created with producing partner Corey Grant, screened at Dances With Films in June. Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch. Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network. Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles. Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the thirteenth of fifteen conversations from that day. Director Jade-Jenise Dixon — who also appears in Volume 4 of this series — sits down with actor, writer, and producer Lanre Idewu. They've been crossing paths since the wrap party for Jade's first feature Truth Hall, where Lanre was the only person on the DVD bonus material who named how much work it must have taken. He knew because he was already producing shorts and understood the distance between twenty minutes and a hundred. Years later they worked together on Kold x Windy. Lanre talks about the lineage that made his own career imaginable, from Oscar Micheaux and Melvin Van Peebles through Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, Ava, Issa, and Lena — you have to see that it's possible before you know what you can do. Jade shares two times she walked away from money: a role handed to her without an audition that she read and refused, and independent film financing that came with conditions she wasn't willing to meet. Lanre closes on how leaving personal training behind was the self-care that let him finally invest in his own acting career. Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch. Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network. Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles. Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the twelfth of fifteen conversations from that day. Filmmaker Rraine Hanson — born in Kingston, based in LA, working across the union art department as set dresser, prop master, and production designer while making his own work — sits down with actor and producer Hari Williams. Rraine heard about Sista Brunch at the Black Indie Ignite summit the day before and came because our language named Black women and gender expansive people, which meant he wouldn't have to choose between a Black space and a queer space. He talks about installation as an extension of his directorial practice, the recurring throughline in his work of treating ourselves and the natural world as sacred, and why the stakes are too high to make anything without intention. He was a Season 7 guest, and his short film Transcend is currently in post, shooting in Kingston. Hari also shares how this celebration came together: a conversation about bringing six seasons of guests into one room where everyone would feel seen. Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch. Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network. Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles. Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eleventh of fifteen conversations from that day. Our drop-in co-host Shawn Pipkin-West — a director and UPM who was a Sista Brunch guest twice before joining us behind the mic — sits down with her friend Janean Jeffries, an executive assistant. Asked what they believed five years ago and no longer do, Shawn says she believed she had to be perfect. What replaced it is a practice of saying yes to what scares her, including this podcast. Janean believed she was too essential to be laid off while doing the work of seven people. She was wrong, and what she took from it is sharper than bitterness: no one needs you, so create things for yourself and build your own community. Shawn also talks about directing one of five horror shorts made in two weeks, deliberately choosing the most ambitious script in the pile. Being on Sista Brunch was on Janean's vision board. As of this episode, it's manifested — welcome to the family. Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch. Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network. Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T. Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles. Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.