Shanestar Productions LGBTQ Film Video Productions

Shanestar Productions produces films about issues from the sidelines of LGBTQ life and brings these issues to the forefront with layered community engagement campaigns through engaging videos and media content. LGBT/Queer Arts is still evolving especially film and video production. Too often, our stories are presented only through well-moneyed lenses, rarely from working class people. In fact, competing with multi-million dollar funded films is always challenging, but our bare-bones projects still sneak in the door. By focusing on issues rarely discussed and approaching our work extreme tenacity and using professional teams, we have been able to create media that makes it hard to ignore these social justice issues.

We have completed five films, two award-winning short documentary films, Wrong Bathroom (2005) and America’s Most Unwanted (2012). We are expanding into narrative based social justice films with our scripts ready for production: Double Secret, Confidential Informant, and The Lottery. Each of these films explores under-reported or hidden issues in the LGBTQ community.

Our first documentary, Wrong Bathroom from 2005 found success, including screening at more than 70 festivals around the world and 171,000 views on YouTube because of its innovation and unique frank perspective and humorous approach. To this day, we have been able to use the video to support safety for transgender and non-conforming people in the restroom. In 2005, when we made the film, it was a taboo issue, today, the topic is in the news daily, with some states acting as aggressors against restroom safety.

Our second award-winning documentary, America’s Most Unwanted, brought to the forefront issues of relevance from LGBTQ foster youth to the larger community in order to create not only dialogue, but connections between the communities to enhance LGBTQ community support of LGBTQ foster youth. In fact, we believe this film’s festival success and community engagement campaign was integral in bringing attention to the homelessness of LGBTQ foster youth to the forefront of our community. Prior to our film, few  in the LGBTQ world knew that ’40% of youth living on the streets self-define as LGBTQ’, now, this statistic is common knowledge. As a small, bare-bones non-profit, rarely are organizations like ours given much credit.

We thrive knowing our ability to be innovative and take steps that larger organizations might take at first, due to their constituent funding constraints.

Our film projects in the works, feature scripts: The Lottery and Confidential Informant and the short film, Double Secret, continue down this path of social justice and using innovative themes to portray issues outside the mainstream. Independent, grassroots oriented and innovative, describes the films of Shanestar Productions.