Daresha Kyi is the director and one of the producers of Mama Bears

As a member of the LGBTQ community, I had heard anti-LGBTQ+ views based in Christianity all my life. So when I learned about these women called “mama bears,” who loved their children unconditionally, despite their teachings in the church, I was inspired to make this film. I recognized the hard work they would have had to do, and the sacrifices that they would have had to make in order to change so drastically. They were heroines.

The second thing that inspired me was that when I shared the Mama Bear’s group with my friend, Scotch, he immediately burst into tears without knowing anything else except that they existed. When he came out to his Jehovah’s Witness mom, she shunned him. And 30-plus years later, he was still feeling that sorrow. Scotch was so moved that he gave us the funding for our first shoot with Sara Cunningham.

The Team

My producer, Laura Tatham was instrumental every step of the way. After Scotch, she was one of the first people I reached out to. The moment I mentioned it to Laura, she said, “I’m in. How can I help?” And we’ve been working side by side ever since.

And so, from that moment forward, I knew that this documentary could be healing for LGBTQ+ Christians, their parents, and those from other conservative religions. It gave me the fortitude to see it through for the five years it took to make it.

Finding Our Subjects

When we began searching for subjects, it took us a long time to find a Black family. But given the history of hypocrisy and denials within the Black church, there was no way I could make this film without having a Black family involved. We were thrilled to find Tammi Terrell Morris, and her mom, Tenita Lewis Artry. We learned of Tammi’s often traumatic coming out story, and that while Tenita was still non-affirming of her lesbian daughter, she did believe that God created Tammi perfectly and she loved her unconditionally. Hers was an important voice in the film because she wanted to convey this message: “You don’t have to agree with your children to love them.”

Funding

In 2018 I was commissioned by the ALCU to make Kai Shappley: A Trans Girl Growing Up In Texas, a short documentary about Kai and her mom Kimberly’s fight for Kai to use the girl’s bathroom at her school in Pearland, Texas. It screened at SXSW, which put the feature, Mama Bears, on their radar, and through our festival distributor, The Film Collaborative, they sent us an early invite! Those are always lovely.

Everybody thinks that I made the short and then it grew into the feature, but that’s not the case. I had already started working on the feature, and during its development, the ACLU call for directors came out, and I answered the call. And so, I did the short film all the while we were shooting Mama Bears. The ACLU paid me a small amount to direct, and even more generously, they gave all the directors ownership of their footage, a lot of which I used in the feature.

And then, here’s what we did: We used the short as a proof of concept for the feature. Once we started using the short for our grant proposals the money started flowing in. And making an even more rewarding experience for all of us, the short went on to win two Webby Awards and an Emmy. It was divine synchronicity.

The short was paid for by ACLU so I wasn’t privy to that budget. But the full budget of the feature was $850K.

The good news is that Mama Bears was funded entirely by grants and donations. So, even though we didn’t make money, we didn’t lose money, and we don’t owe any either.

We got a couple of key grants. We got a small grant from the Arch & Bruce Foundation, but the first substantial grant we got was from Firelight Media, and then from Chicken & Egg. Afterwards, we received funding from Catapult, IDA, and then the ITVS co-production deal.

When we received those grants, they gave us the stats, and around 1% of people are granted funding these days. Of the grants that we got, we were rejected at least once before we reapplied and were finally chosen to receive the grant.

Laura and I did do a crowdfunding campaign. We weren’t very good at it, however, and we didn’t allow ourselves enough time to ramp up. What I’ve learned from studying other successful crowdfunding campaigns is that it takes a team and that a lot of times people have donors lined up to give money at strategic parts of their campaigns. So, we raised, approximately $8K in our campaign—as opposed to the $850K or even $80K, $40K, or even a full $10K. It was just so much work for so little payoff.

For people who are not in this industry, $7K, $8K sounds like money, but it’s not when it comes to filmmaking. That’s approximately one day of shooting. Actually, that $8K paid for our trip to Laramie, Wyoming to shoot with Sarah and Parker when they were on the second “Free Mom Hugs” tour. So, of course it was worth it, because otherwise we wouldn’t have had that money to go. It came in right on time for us to shoot that. But, after that, we were both like, “We’ll never do that again.” If I ever have another crowdfunding campaign, it will be because I hired somebody to run it who knows how to do it up right. It must be shouted it from the rooftops that running a crowdfunding campaign is a fulltime job for a dedicated team of people involved from the beginning.

Film Festivals

Film festivals are a fantastic platform for documentaries, and we were incredibly grateful for our world premiere at SXSW. And while we didn’t make the budget back, we have made great money from the festival distribution as we were the top-grossing film for The Film Collaborative in 2022. And that was only in the last three quarters of 2022 because we premiered in March, and in those three quarters, we booked 96 film festivals, and in 2023 we were invited to another 66! The film continues to book in 2024, as well.

But even with all this success, we were preaching to the choir in many respects. We knew our larger target audiences were the mama bears themselves and the religious LGBTQ+ communities. We want to also reach the conservative and general Christian churches, and other religions where homophobia is the norm.

Sales

WME became our sales agent shortly after our SXSW premiere, but they weren’t able to sell it. Unfortunately, 2022 was the year that all the streamers started reorganizing and laying off large percentages of their staff, and halting film purchases. Everybody said, “We love this film, but we just can’t do it.” And 2023 seemed even tougher.

Theatrical

Although we didn’t find a distributor to sell our film, we did do a limited theatrical run in a number of small theaters:

We would like to have done a bigger one in New York and Los Angeles to have a qualifying Oscar run, but we had applied for many awards, including the GLAAD award, that we didn’t receive, so I did not think we were going to get an Oscar nomination and thus just kept the theatrical focus on the smaller cities with the largest impact.

We were going to seal the deal on distribution with Freestyle Media, but we received advice from an independent distribution consultant, who suggested this deal would eliminate the possibility for us to make money through educational distribution—the argument being, why would people buy it educationally when they could just rent it for much less money on one of these streaming platforms? Also, in terms of speaking engagements, and ancillary income avenues, there is more opportunity if it’s not available on an easy-to-access streaming platform.

Impact Campaign

In the beginning of making Mama Bears, I wasn’t thinking so much about traditional distribution, but I was thinking about the impact campaign. I wanted to get this film into churches and use the film as a tool to generate conversations between the LGBTQ+ and conservative Christian and other religious communities. And so, as I was writing the first grant proposals, I was, in fact, writing the impact campaign at the same time.

The first money we received in support of the impact campaign was actually before the film was even finished. We remain hopeful that now that we had such a prestigious premiere, and a truly amazing festival run, that this will help us as we continue to raise funding for our impact campaign budget of $300K. So far, we have partnered with the Human Rights Campaign, PFLAG, the mama bears, and Free Mom Hugs as part of our impact campaign. Once the campaign budget is fully funded, we will also look at other ancillary streams of income like DVDs, etc.

In 2023 we did a tour with South Arts Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, which is an Atlanta-based organization that provides filmmakers grant money for the team’s travel, speaker’s fees, plus a screening rental fee. Then they work with each one of the host organizations in the various cities to help with marketing and promotion of your film. It wasn’t a money-making venture, but it was amazing to screen and connect with audiences in over 12 cities throughout southern United States.

As part of our continued impact campaign, we want to cut short videos of a lot of the material that didn’t make it into the film. For example, we shot several interviews with affirming pastors, some of whom were former evangelicals. We want these videos to not only be available to Christian congregations, but also for pastors to use amongst themselves. The messages that people are getting from the pulpit absolutely drive the way they vote. So, our $300K budget also covers editing those videos, making them available, and then revamping our website so that it becomes more of a hub for those communities to come together.

The Process

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how I got these women to open up. How did I get them to be so vulnerable and so honest? And there’s a couple of answers to that. One is that when I first found the mama bears, I reached out to the admin, Liz Dyer, who’s in the film, and said, “I’m a filmmaker and I’d like to make a movie about you all because I think you’re heroic.” She said, “Send me an email about who you are and what you’d like to do, I’ll send it to the moms and we’ll see how they respond,” and 23 mothers responded. They said, “This is my story but even if you don’t pick my story, thank you for sharing our stories,” because they understood the importance of storytelling, as members of a religious tradition where giving your testimony cannot be refuted. So, when you tell your story in church, when you testify in church, nobody refutes your testimony, right?

When people ask me for advice for emerging documentary filmmakers, one of the things I always say is that you’ve got to find people who want to tell their stories, and who are good storytellers—people who are articulate, and personable, and charming. And then, I just try to create a safe space where people know they’re not being judged. I try to practice deep listening, and that allows people to open up. I’m not interrupting them. I’m not focused on my questions or rushing to get to the next one. It’s a conversation, and my interviews tend to be really long because I’m letting them guide me and I’m letting them tell their story in their own words. And so, they feel confident, especially after the first interview. They’re like, “Oh, okay. She’s really listening.”

Hindsight Is 20/20

A couple of things I would have done differently was to collect emails everywhere we went. We did do some of that, but I would have been much more diligent about it. Ownership of audience data is crucial for filmmakers. I also believe one of the main things I would have addressed is this: I’m a people person, I’m very personable, but I’m not a great schmoozer and neither is Laura. We’re not bad with it, but we’re not the best glad-handers. And so, that’s a skill that I think you either have it or you don’t. So, I probably would have hired somebody to glad-hand more for us. And I would have an actual assistant so that I wouldn’t have been so overwhelmed all the time.

Though, in terms of the actual process of making the film, I don’t think I would have done anything differently because every film is such a unique journey and such a roller coaster ride. In hindsight, you can say, “Well, I should have done a lot more,” but what good is that? You didn’t do it, and you can’t change that.

The Future

We’ve made great strides in learning from Mama Bears, as we work on our current project about Cliff Albright and LaTosha Brown, the co-founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund and the work they did in 2020 and 2021 to flip Georgia from red to blue. So, we embedded ourselves with them, and shot with them from July, 2020 all the way up to January 7, 2021. A lot of behind the scenes were done in their homes and on the buses. We traveled to 13 states with them and watched them figure out how to get people excited to vote while keeping them safe in the midst of the pandemic before there was a vaccine. They had rallies at drive-in theaters, and in parking lots. Instead of going door-to-door they did car caravans, driving into people’s neighborhoods, playing music, giving away free food, and PPE, and all kinds of stuff. It was amazing.

We’ve shot the film already and have been sitting on it because we ran out of funding. In 2020 and early 2021, people were just throwing money at us because of the George Floyd tragedy and subsequent uprising. But then Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff got elected, and democracy was apparently saved and suddenly, the money just dried up.

The budget is currently at $1.5M and we need an additional $500K to finish it and get it out into the world before this year’s Presidential election. We raised $800K through a combination of grants, donations, and investors.

Takeaways

So, I know that if our impact campaign can get it before these audiences, it will have a real effect. Not everybody’s going to be moved to change, we don’t expect that. We don’t expect people who have been moved to change in their hearts and minds, to then start marching in the streets, and handing out hugs. But if they can just love their children, that will be enough.

Our first call to action: Love your children as they are.

The second call to action: Be politically and socially active, protect your children, and protect their rights.

Vote like you love them. Vote like they matter. Even if you don’t agree, you don’t want them to be killed in the street because no one would help them, because no one thinks they have value, which is particularly true with easily victimized people: masculine women, feminine men, and our trans and non-binary folks.

We have anecdotal information, but we don’t have any hard stats of voting changes, or anything like that. But we have been told by viewers that the film changed their minds. I believe one of the main catalysts for change is Kai, because many people think they understand what trans is, but they really didn’t. We heard after many screenings, “We believe in LGBTQ+ rights, but we thought that trans kids were being told by their parents to act that way. And now, we understand that that’s just the way they come.”

We have been told by conservative Christians that the film has cracked their hearts open and that they are changing the way they think, and the way they vote. At a screening in Seattle, I was told by an Evangelical Christian who is the grandmother of a non-binary child that before seeing the film she was confused, she was struggling, and having a really hard time accepting her grandchild. After seeing the film, she understood what she needed to do, and that was to join the mama bears!

Another big takeaway for me is that change doesn’t happen over night. It’s a process that is perfectly demonstrated by the growth of Tenita, the African American mom in the film. Tammi and her partner Sade are getting married and Tenita is buying their wedding cake. And she and Tammi held a screening for their entire family, after which they did the Q&A together!

Tenita taught me that you can’t force or convince folks to change, that you just have to allow them to take their time to grieve, to learn, and to grow.

TFC Takeaways

We’ve been big fans of this film for more than 2 years. We all know that the state of digital distribution is tough right now for independent filmmakers, so it’s not surprising that not all films are offered distribution deals at their world premieres, even if that premiere is as high-profile a festival as SXSW. But in addition to that, director Daresha Kyi and her team have made a deliberate choice to place preference on Impact, in the way that she stated that she thought about impact even before distribution, that they received impact funding even before the film was finished, and that nearly two years after their world premiere they are keeping a digital release at bay for a bit longer to focus on educational distribution and continued impact screenings.

TL;DR

With Mama Bears, director Daresha Kyi placed an emphasis on not merely storytelling, but giving her subjects the space to tell their stories by simply listening. Her approach mirrors what she would wish for those parents with LGBTQ+ children who have a chance to view the film: to listen to them, and love them as they are. It’s no wonder that this film has resonated on the festival circuit, with over 150 festival and impact screenings (and counting) booked in the two years since its premiere at SXSW. Mama Bears was the most booked festival film for The Film Collaborative in 2022.