The Girls at the Painted Bird
2023
Role: Director / Producer
Written by Savannah Reich
Directed by Lisa Channer
Brennan Vance, Director of Photography
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Best Ensemble Cast; Yale in Hollywood Film Festival 2024
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Leslie Vincent
Michelle de Joya
Shanan Custer
Jason Ballweber
George Keller
Dan Dukich
Alex Galick
Ryan Colbert
Leni More
Margaret Borges
Drew Chapman
Alexander Rovinksy
Wes Chapman
Dawn Chapman
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First Assistant Director — Victoria Bruce
Production Sound Mixer — Owen Brafford
Set Decorators — Malia Bantz, Halle Fodness
Costumer — Claire Looker
Hair & Makeup Artist — Crist Ballas
Assistant Hair & Makeup Artist — Zamora Simmons
Gaffer — Doug Gander
Key Grip — Thomas VandenDolder
Swing — Alan Taverna
Key Production Assistant — Tori Vang
Set Interns — Christine La, Erin Brown, Logan Willhite-Xiong, Russ Cho, Olivia Wies, Ryan Witte, Robbie Witcherman
Colorist — Nick Hillyard
Sound Designer — Jason Almendinger
The Girls at the Painted Bird premiered at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in 2024.
About the Denim Trilogy
In 2017, I was commissioned to conduct research for a play about America with playwright Savannah Reich. The play, DENIM, would uncover the roots of our American mythologies by telling the story of denim jeans, the quintessential American uniform. Our research took us to Gold Rush archives in San Francisco where research into Levi Strauss and the Gold Rush revealed multitudes of false assumptions in our common understanding of the period. When myths clash against the historical record, absurdity is created, and so our entry point for the DENIM project was always humor.
This series of Feminist Western shorts subverts the genre to propose a new frontier; one where cowboys hug it out, female business owners finish first, and outlaws aren’t afraid to cry. We’ve completed two short films, Standoff (2021) and Men Among Men (2020), and with your support, will shoot this third film, Girls at the Painted Bird, in August of 2023!
The California Gold rush was a violent turning point in our country’s self-image. Turning away from the ideals of democracy and education, our culture fell in love with freedom and guns. In our films, we imagine a new mythology of the American West: not as it was, but as it might have been.
A group of “fallen women” in the Old West get rich quick when they discover the true gold rush – charging men for their emotional labor.
