Bold Storytelling Studio
Explore unique narratives in independent film and documentary art.
Bold Storytelling Studio
Explore unique narratives in independent film and documentary art.
About Lilac Creative Studio
Our Vision
At Lilac Creative Studio, we believe in the power of storytelling to connect people and evoke emotions. Our mission is to craft compelling narratives that resonate with audiences and inspire change.
Documentaries
Diamond in the Rust
Where the Light Still Glows
Diamond in the Rust is a documentary exploring the decades-long redevelopment failures of Willets Point in Queens, better known as “The Iron Triangle.” Once home to hundreds of auto shops and immigrant-run businesses, the neighborhood has endured broken promises of affordable housing, stalled projects, and political battles spanning multiple administrations. Now, with New York Mets owner Steve Cohen proposing an $8 billion casino and entertainment complex beside Citi Field, the film asks whether this latest plan will finally deliver on long-promised housing and renewal—or simply mark another chapter in a history of displacement and profit-driven urban planning.
Where the Light Still Glows
Where the Light Still Glows
Where the Light Still Glows is a creative nonfiction documentary exploring the quiet disappearance of fireflies and glowworms across the United States, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Blending immersive low-light cinematography with personal narration and scientific insight, the film examines what we lose—biologically, culturally, and emotionally—when these luminous species fade from our landscapes. Through intimate encounters with conservationists, community stewards, and fragile habitats, the film invites viewers to rediscover these glowing creatures as both ecological indicators and symbols of wonder at the edge of extinction.
Shattered Streets
Shattered Streets investigates the intersection of post-apartheid urban neglect and the environmental consequences of structural racism in Cape Town—uncovering how the residues of apartheid still shape the city’s landscapes, communities, and ecological vulnerability.
Bitter Sugar
Bitter Sugar tells the story of Veruca Salt, the Chicago-born alt-rock band fronted by Louise Post and Nina Gordon, whose unapologetically loud, female-driven sound helped define 1990s rock. Through archival footage and present-day interviews, the film traces their meteoric rise, turbulent split, and enduring legacy as trailblazers of women in hard rock.
Boarding Pass
Boarding Pass uncovers how Avelo Airlines—hailed as a fast-growing budget carrier—has quietly profited from a government contract to operate deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raising urgent questions about corporate ethics, immigration policy, and community accountability in cities like New Haven, Connecticut.
Thank You for Not Making Sense
Thank You for Not Making Sense is a nonlinear, avant-garde documentary that drifts through the lives and work of unconventional artists who embrace absurdity, surrealism, and contradiction as acts of creative defiance. Structured like a cinematic sketchbook, the film weaves together dreamlike imagery, fragmented soundscapes, and intimate portraits to reveal how “nonsense” can be a radical form of connection and empathy. Rather than explain art, it listens to it—becoming a love letter to confusion, vulnerability, and the beauty of resisting clarity.
Narrative Projects
Up the Creek
The Crooked Grove
In 2059, two estranged childhood friends return to their collapsing hometown for the funeral of a teammate, only to find the poisoned land mirrors their own fractured bond. As gasoline fuels a broken America and fossil-fuel cults rise from the ashes of government, their grief curdles into accusation and violence at the polluted creek where their friendship began. A dystopian drama of memory, betrayal, and the quiet end of a world
The Crooked Grove
The Crooked Grove
In the aftermath of a self-imposed exile, a fading tech executive emerges into a society overtaken by AI and human-machine hybrids in the year 2037. Drawn back to a twisted grove from his childhood — a place where time and memory fracture — he and a wary waitress unravel the origins of a digital regime that has hollowed out humanity.
The Call of the Lune
In rural Vermont, grieving son Oscar inherits his mother’s cottage and begins nightly walks under an unnervingly still moon. There he encounters Lune—a spectral muse whose voice blends loon’s cry, moonlight, and madness—drawing him into a spiral where grief and obsession blur. A psychological horror about silence, memory, and the haunting persistence of feminine power
He Carved the Land
In 1896, legendary frontiersman Jedediah Rivers sets out to map the unforgiving Sierra Nevada, carving his name into the wilderness through blood and sacrifice. Narrated years later by his son Morgan, the story unravels the myth of heroism to reveal the cost of conquest—on people, land, and memory. A historical neo-western, it examines how legacies are forged in silence as much as in triumph
Red in the Marshlands
Delaware, 1955: a small coastal town choked by marshland and paranoia finds its water poisoned, its faith tested, and its secrets clawing to the surface. Detective Hollis Grackle and exiled investigator Morgan Rivers—two men broken by grief and war—uncover corruption and ecological collapse buried beneath church steeples and civic pride. A folk horror noir where truth and survival rarely align
Plastic Flamingoes
Florida, 1967: in a decaying beachside motel littered with sun-bleached flamingoes and broken promises, Morgan Rivers and Hollis Grackle cross paths once more. Twelve years after their last case destroyed them, the two men circle each other amid conspiracies, cults, and vanishing girls. A hallucinatory neo-noir, the film peels back America’s pastel façade to reveal the rot beneath the dream
Under Neon Lights
Down and Out in Paradise
Down and Out in Paradise
Under Neon Lights is a stylized period drama set in post-war Japan, following an American drifter who takes refuge inside the crumbling Osaka Stadium. Amidst the city’s uneasy reconstruction, he navigates the clash between tradition and Western influence, finding unlikely kinship with locals who haunt the stadium’s underbelly—black market hustlers, disillusioned veterans, and artists searching for meaning in ruin. As neon signs flicker over a fractured city, his story becomes one of survival, reinvention, and the blurred line between belonging and exile.
Down and Out in Paradise
Down and Out in Paradise
Down and Out in Paradise
Down and Out in Paradise is a cinematic portrait of Anthony Bourdain—chef, traveler, writer, and restless seeker. Based on the acclaimed biography, the film traces Bourdain’s unlikely rise from the kitchens of New York to global icon, while delving into the contradictions that defined him: a man who celebrated the joy of food and culture yet wrestled with profound inner turmoil. Moving through kitchens, back alleys, bustling markets, and quiet hotel rooms, the film is both a celebration of Bourdain’s fearless curiosity and an unflinching look at the costs of living without limits.