ASCENSION | 2021, China | MTV Documentaries
Consultant: Stephen Maing (Firelight Media Fellowship Mentor)
Directed by Jessica Kingdon
Ascension examines the contemporary “Chinese Dream” through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. In cinematically exploring the aspiration that drives today’s People’s Republic of China, the film plunges into universal paradoxes of economic progress.
Awards/Nominations
Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Featuree
Critics Choice
Gotham Awards
DOC NYC
Cinema Eye
International Documentary Association
Independent Spirit Awards
DGA
PGA
THREE SONGS FOR BENAZIR | 2021, US | NETFLIX
Consulting Producer
Directed by Gulistan and Elizabeth Mirzai
The story of Shaista, a young man who—newly married to Benazir and living in a camp for displaced persons in Kabul—struggles to balance his dreams of being the first from his tribe to join the Afghan National Army with the responsibilities of starting a family. Even as Shaista’s love for Benazir is palpable, the choices he must make to build a life with her have profound consequences.
Awards/Nominations
Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Short
Full Frame, Best Short
Cinema Eye Honors, Outstanding Achievement in Non-fiction Short Filmmaking
Grierson Awards, Best Short
BAD AXE | 2022, US | IFC FILMS
Story Consultant: Stephen Maing (Center for Asian American Media Mentor)
Directed by David Siev
BAD AXE captures a closely-knit Asian American family living in rural Michigan during the pandemic as they fight to keep their local restaurant and American dream alive. With rising racial tensions, the family uses their voice and must unite as they reckon with backlash from a divided community, white supremacists, and intergenerational trauma from Cambodia's "killing fields."
Awards/Nominations
SXSW Best Documentary Feature
Critics Choice Best Documentary
Traverse City Film Festival Audience Award
FOR OUR CHILDREN | 2024, US | Netflix
Contributing Producer + Consulting Editor: Stephen Maing (Firelight Media Fellowship Mentor)
Directed by Débora Souza Silva
A documentary feature following the mothers behind the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Long before George Floyd’s murder and the BLM protests in 2020, Oscar Grant’s 2009 fateful encounter with law enforcement on a BART platform seeded public awareness and cultural consciousness of systemic racism and its discontents. Paying forward lessons learned and advocating against anti-Black violence in memory of her son, Oscar, Wanda Johnson holds space for Angela Williams, whose teen son, Ulysses, survives a police encounter in Troy, Alabama, living to tell his story.
Radical empathy fuels this timely exposé.
THE HOLLY | 2022, US | Apple TV, Hulu, Prime
Consulting Producer: Stephen Maing
Directed by Julian Rubinstein
THE HOLLY goes deep inside a gentrifying community in Denver, where a shooting case involving an activist becomes a window into the political machinations of urban development and the city’s gang activity.
Awards
Santa Fe International Film Festival Best Documentary
Denver International Film Festival People’s Choice Award
Telluride Mountainfilm Festival Audience Award
HERS TO LOSE | US | NEW YORK TIMES
Editor, Co-Director & Producer: Stephen Maing
From the start of the New York City mayoral race, Christine Quinn had it all: name recognition, an overflowing war chest and a seven-year record of accomplishment as City Council speaker. She was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s heir apparent, on track to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor. Then, a month before the primary on Sept. 10, she began to slide in the polls.
This is the story of her collapse, as witnessed from within her campaign.
Winner - 2014 World Press Photo, long feature, second place, Hers to Lose
Winner - 2014 POYi, documentary journalism, third place, Hers to Lose
DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL | 2020, US | Kino Lorber
Additional Editor: Stephen Maing
Directed by Ursula Liang
When a Chinese-American police officer kills an unarmed Black man in a darkened stairwell of a New York City housing project, it sets off a firestorm of emotion and calls for accountability. When he becomes the first NYPD officer convicted of an on duty shooting in over a decade, the fight for justice becomes complicated, igniting one of the largest Asian-American protests in history and disrupting a legacy of solidarity.
Awards/Nominations
Ashland Independent FF | Les Blank Award for Best Documentary Feature
Ashland Independent FF | Special Recognition for Documentary Featuring Editing
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival | Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature
San Diego Asian American Film Festival | Audience Award
EMERGENT CITY | 2024, US | P.O.V.
Executive Producer: Stephen Maing
Directed by Kelly Anderson & Jay Arthur Sterrenberg
Emergent City is an observational civic epic. It sheds light on power and process, illuminating systems and giving viewers a front row seat to the public and private spaces where the city is shaped. With extraordinary access, it tracks an ensemble of participants including the local council member, Industry City’s developers and community members with divergent stakes. The film explores the profound intersections of gentrification, climate crisis and real estate development, and asks how change might emerge from dialogue and collective action in a world where too many outcomes are constrained by money, politics and business as usual.
Awards/Nominations
Best Documentary, Tribeca Film Festival Nominee
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS | US | TIME MAGAZINE
Editor: Stephen Maing
Directed by Paul Moakley
Photographer Donna Ferrato helped bring awareness to the epidemic of domestic violence in the United States through her raw and often graphic portraits of survivors of violence. But she fell into the work by accident after witnessing domestic violence firsthand.