In a poetic mix of dance, visual narrative, and documentary, Saturn Risin9 follows queer performance artist Saturn on their return home to the Bay Area. We follow their journey of perseverance centering self discovery, affirmation, healing and creative expansion poetically told through fantastical imagery. Using diary style interviews and talk-alongs intercut with high fantasy staged performance, the film portrays Saturn’s creative transformation through their dreams, trials, career and progression. The film begins and ends adjacent to one of the most toxic Superfund Sites in the city, Hunter’s Point Shipyard. The nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean after WWII which sickened populations there, were linked to the ships that came back to Hunter’s Point with radioactive debris - the toxic radiation washed into the water and soil. Saturn's journey through this space extends to their own personal struggles, paralleled with environmental and water issues that continue to this day. Saturn speaks to their own journey of transformation, healing with community, and finding space to thrive at the edges. This film highlights Saturn both as a storyteller in many different forms (word, dance, music) and as a protagonist through a character driven story of perseverance. Saturn Risin9 as a film exists as a byproduct of love, trust, and the determination to realize dreams, intended to be a never ending well of visual and lyrical affirmations.

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Tiare Ribeaux is a Kānaka ‘Ōiwi filmmaker based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Her films disrupt conventional storytelling methods by employing magical realist explorations of spirituality, labor, and the environment to critique both social and ecological imbalances. Her films use components of speculative fiction and fantasy to reimagine both our present realities and future trajectories of healing, queerness, lineage, and belonging. Ribeaux’s work traverses between the mundane and dreamworlds - creating stories around transformation and how our bodies are inextricably linked to land and water systems. She integrates immersion within community, personal/ancestral narratives, and Hawaiian cosmology into her films. Her work often combines with installation elements to create immersive and expanded media experiences. She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Creative Capital Award, the NDN Radical Imagination Grant, the Native Lab Fellowship and Indigenous Film Fund from Sundance, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund, among others.

Jody Stillwater (周青海) (Co-Director) is a writer, director and creative technologist from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arrhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation and narrative cinema. He is a finalist for the SFFILM Kenneth Rainin Screenwriting Grant and has screened his films at the De Young Museum, YBCA, Mutek, ISEA 2019 South Korea, Marfa Film Festival, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival in Barcelona, Rockefeller’s Imagine Science Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival, directed films for Google, Knotel, Bentley Mills, performed & installed multiple new media projects at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab (incorporating film + technology), the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab (built around choreography + film), appeared as a featured guest on Asian Pacific America with Robert Handa on NBC and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018. He has received grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and Fleischhacker Foundations.

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*Associate Producer: Saturn Risin9

Drone Operator: Inti Fernandez, Max Schwartz

Steadicam / 1st AC: Nick Schwyter

2nd AC: Annie Li

Gaffer: Drew Nelson

Gaffer: Tej Virdi

PA/Wardrobe: Najee Rene

Art Department: Keri Shewmaker

BTS: Deb Leal, Max Schwartz

Security: VMA Security Group

Styling: Tiare Ribeaux, Saturn Risin9

Costume: Zil Julie Vostalove, Helena Todd, Transformer Jacket, Yu Wei (EWIV), Yang Yue