PARAMITA, directed by Re-Take Oakland filmmaker Kirthi Nath will have a film screening and healing workshop on March 7. This experiential workshop invites you to slow down and experience what it means to belong—to oneself, one another, and the natural world. The workshop weaves together meditation, healing rituals, sacred reflection, community care circles, and a screening of the film PARAMITA.

Opening Doorways for Healing and Belonging

Sat, March 7, 10AM-2PM
San Francisco Dharma Collective

PARAMITA is a documentary short that blends poetry, memoir, and prayer to explore the transformative power of mindfulness, acceptance, and belonging. The film bears witness to Prajna Choudhury’s 25-year journey of coming out to her traditional Bangladeshi mother. Told with intimacy, tenderness, and quiet power, PARAMITA invites viewers into a meditative spiritual experience, as Prajna connects with Buddhist practices and nature as pathways to intergenerational healing and reconciliation.

For Us, By Us fellow Priyanka Suryaneni was awarded the East Bay Fund for Artists grant from the East Bay Community Foundation for her film, Inkilab (Revolution). All works supported by the East Bay Fund for Artists highlight narratives of cultural identity, resistance, healing, and belonging, centering the histories and futures of BIPOC communities in the East Bay.

Inkilab (Revolution) follows dancer Joti Singh as she seeks to reclaim the tarnished legacy of her great-grandfather, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee—a freedom fighter in the San Francisco–based Ghadar Party, the first organized transnational Indian freedom movement led by immigrant workers.

For Us, By Us fellow Deepa Nair was awarded a 2025 Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant. This grant provides financial support to independent creatives making or presenting creative work relating to or encouraging community engagement.

Deepa’s current project is Claire’s Crunch Cake, a documentary short film featuring Claire Mack, a beloved 88-year-old local baker, former public television broadcaster, social justice activist, and the first Black mayor of San Mateo.

For Us, By Us fellow Diana Diroy was awarded a CCI Investing in Artists: Artistic Innovation Grant for her project, Seeds of Ancestral Memory. This grant supports diverse Bay Area working artists who are developing new work in the performing or media arts that pushes the envelope of their creative process, explores new artistic collaborations, and/or supports artistic growth and experimentation that extends the boundaries of their art-making.

Seeds of Ancestral Memory is a documentary exploring how immigrants, refugees and their descendants living in the Bay Area are cultivating seeds and growing heritage crops from their homelands to feed their kin and communities.

A preview of On Woody Lane, directed by For Us, By Us fellow Rose Hoang, was featured in Meet Me in SF’s Cinema Night Market on November 21, 2025. The event included a program of short films, food and fashion vendors, and local art.

On Woody Lane, set in San Jose, California, follows a rebellious daughter of Vietnamese immigrants as she documents her father’s birdcage business. With the help of a tiny camera and humor, she examines what it means to dream in a home lingering with post-Vietnam War survival, cigarettes, and chatty birds on Woody Lane.

Finding Má, directed by For Us, By Us fellow, Thanh Tran, was awarded a 2025 Sundance Institute Documentary Fund Grant. The Documentary Fund supports global nonfiction storytelling on timely subjects that drive cultural and social impact.

Finding Má is a documentary about an Amerasian Vietnamese and Black family shattered by the foster care and prison systems who reunite to heal old wounds and rebuild their family, starting with finding their unhoused mother in the streets of Sacramento.

Re-Take Oakland filmmaker, Jennifer Huang, was selected as a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellow. Fellows each receive an unrestricted grant of $40,000 to support their creative practice. The Eureka Fellowship is among the largest fellowship awards for visual artists in Northern California.

Jennifer is currently in post production on her first feature-length documentary, The Long Rescue, chronicling the recovery journey of teen sex trafficking survivors in the Philippines. The film is an intimate glimpse into the struggles, achievements, creativity and profound humanity of vulnerable young women whose bodies were commodified but who never stop persisting.

Saranam Gacchâmi, directed by For Us, By Us fellow Priyanka Suryaneni, and My Name is Lai, directed by Re-Take Oakland filmmaker Lucy Saephan, are screening in Roots & Remembrance, an evening of short films for EastSide Arts Alliance’s Film Fridays series in honor of World Refugee Day. The films were curated by Priyanka Suryaneni.

EastSide Arts Alliance
2277 International Blvd, Oakland
Friday, June 20, 2025, 6:00pm
Free event

Saranam Gacchâmi is a documentary film about an enterprising Buddhist Monk who defies all odds to set up one of the largest Tibetan Monasteries in the Bay Area to preserve the endangered Tibetan culture and traditions.

In My Name is Lai, a first generation Mien American elder shares the events leading up to her arrival to the U.S. as a refugee survivor of war.

PARAMITA, directed by Re-Take Oakland filmmaker Kirthi Nath will be screening at SF DocFest and Queer Women of Color Film Festival.

SF DocFest

Short Stories Part One
Sat, May 31st, 8:30 PM @ Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Online: May 29, 12:00 AM – June 8, 11:59 PM

Tickets

Queer Women of Color Film Festival

THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL
Saturday, June 14, 2025, 12 PM @ Presidio Theatre, San Francisco

Tickets

PARAMITA is a documentary short that blends poetry, memoir, and prayer to explore the transformative power of mindfulness, acceptance, and belonging. The film bears witness to Prajna Choudhury’s 25-year journey of coming out to her traditional Bangladeshi mother. Told with intimacy, tenderness, and quiet power, PARAMITA invites viewers into a meditative spiritual experience, as Prajna connects with Buddhist practices and nature as pathways to intergenerational healing and reconciliation.