Flies Collective

When Layal (45) – Arabic professor at Indiana University and single-mother from Lebanon – learns that her son Daniel (17) has violently assaulted a fellow student during high school hockey practice, everything is turned upside down. Remorseless, (and with a collapsed lung that will take weeks to heal), Daniel faces expulsion and pending battery charges. decides it’s best he move out to his father’s place in California.

But with a recovering lung, Daniel can’t board an airplane. So they pack up their 1999 Jeep Cherokee and set out by car.

Neither of them has seen this country before. Neither of them will know what the next mile will bring as they stop at diners, motels, and hot springs.

Touching, soulful, funny – Tomahawk Springs is a comedic drama about a mother and son on an odyssey. A Lebanese woman in America and her second-generation teenager who barely speaks any Arabic. One riding shotgun, the other at the wheel – they journey the open road and encounter themselves along the way.

Currently in pre-production.

Ramzi Bashour was a Dean’s Fellow and holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His thesis film, THE TREES (2021), won the international Special Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival and screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Melbourne International Film Festival. Ramzi served as producer and composer on A LOVE SONG (dir: Max Walker-Silverman), which was a Sundance darling and was distributed by Sony and Bleecker Street in 2022. TOMAHAWK SPRINGS will be his first feature film.

VALLEY OF THE TALL GRASS follows an old TV/VCR as it travels throughout an Oregon town. After the death of an elderly mother, her daughter throws the device away, which initiates an exploration of the lives it encounters, and an exploration of race and class in this community. It comes into possession of Native American Paiute sisters, a Ryukyuan artist from Japan, a gutter punk, and a Mixtec father and his teenage skater daughter. The film makes visible a group of indigenous people who have lost ties to their land but have cultivated a meaningful life through family bonds and memories, which are set in motion by their encounter with the object.

Currently in pre-production.

Masami Kawai is a Los Angeles-born filmmaker, who divides her time between Oregon and L.A. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Filmmaking at the University of Oregon. Her work integrates issues of race, class, gender, and what it means to be an immigrant in the United States. Kawai participated in Film Independent's diversity program, Project Involve, and her work has screened at various venues, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, LACMA, Portland International Film Festival, and Indie Memphis. Her film TIDES won Best Narrative Short at the Northwest Film Forum's Film Festival and the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Her film ZONA won Best Narrative Short at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. VALLEY OF THE TALL GRASS will be her first feature film.