On a tiny island in NYC, a group of Black and brown disabled artists fight Covid and the city to protect the lives of 500 vulnerable nursing home residents.
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"An intimate and raw film… a powerful reminder of how defining and devastating the pandemic was, and gives space to those whose voices were long ignored."
Concepción de León, The New York Times
Synopsis
Fire Through Dry Grass uncovers in real-time the devastation experienced by residents of a New York City nursing home during the coronavirus pandemic. Co-Directors Alexis Neophytides and Andres “Jay” Molina take viewers inside Coler, on Roosevelt Island, where Jay lives with his fellow Reality Poets, a group of mostly gun violence survivors.
Wearing snapback caps and Air Jordans, Jay and the other Reality Poets don’t look like typical nursing home residents. They used to travel around the city sharing their art and hard-earned wisdom with youth. Now, using GoPros clamped to their wheelchairs, they document their harrowing experiences on “lock down.” Covid-positive patients are moved into their bedrooms; nurses fashion PPE out of garbage bags; refrigerated-trailer morgues hum outside residents’ windows. All the while public officials deny the suffering and dying behind Coler’s brick walls.
The Reality Poets’ rhymes flow throughout the film, underscoring their feelings that their home is now as dangerous as the streets they once ran and—as summer turns to fall turns to winter—that they’re prisoners without a release date. But instead of history repeating itself on this tiny island with a dark history of institutional neglect and abandonment, Fire Through Dry Grass shows these disabled Black and brown artists refusing to be abused, confined, erased.
Trailer
Meet The Team
Andres “Jay” Molina | Co-Director, Cinematographer, Reality Poet
Andres "Jay'' Molina grew up in the Dominican Republic where he played minor league ball. In his late teens he left the D.R. for New York's Lower East Side with dreams of going to college. Jay put school on hold, working twelve-hour days to support himself and his mother. In his late twenties, Jay found a way to make more money in a day than his whole paycheck driving a truck. He started selling drugs and spent time in prison all the while neglecting his health. In 2014 Jay developed a rare lung condition that attacked his vital organs and took his ability to walk. Today Jay is nourishing a passion for filmmaking and animation, and being of service to and advocating for people living with disabilities. His poetry and writings have been published in NYU’s Literacy Review, The Main Street Wire and Wheeling & Healing: A Poetry Anthology Edited by OPEN DOORS Reality Poets. He’s a recipient of the 2020 NYC Mayor’s Office Safe In The City Grant.
Alexis Neophytides | Co-Director, Producer, Cinematographer
Alexis Neophytides is a documentary filmmaker and educator based in New York City. Her work centers around community and how we find meaning in people and place. She is the co-creator, co-director and producer of Neighborhood Slice, a public television documentary series that tells the stories of longtime New Yorkers who've held onto their little corner of the city despite fast-growing gentrification. She produced and directed the series 9.99, for which she won a NY Emmy. Her first feature-length documentary, Dear Thirteen, explores coming of age in the modern world and premiered at DOC NYC in 2022. She is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Grantee for her second feature, Fire Through Dry Grass, co-directed with Andres “Jay” Molina. Over the past decade she has developed filmmaking programs, implemented curricula and taught students all around NYC. In 2019 Alexis was a visiting artist for OPEN DOORS, where she met the Reality Poets and began working with Jay. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.
Jennilie Brewster | Producer
Jennilie Brewster is an artist who works in various forms and in community. She has traveled around the country painting and writing in response to the topographies, mythologies, and metaphoric possibilities of landscape. She is the recipient of numerous residencies and fellowships, and her work has been shown in galleries and museums and published in literary journals. For seven years, she lived on Roosevelt Island, where she developed and led the arts-and-justice initiative OPEN DOORS. In this role, Jennilie guided organizing campaigns and creative collaborations with the Reality Poets—a collective of long-term care residents and gun violence survivors.
M’Daya Meliani | Editor
M'Daya Meliani is an LA-based editor whose career spans over 19 years in television and documentary film. Emmy-nominated for her work on the award-winning A&E docu-series Born This Way, her recent work includes: House of Secrets: the Burari Deaths (Netflix), feature documentary Groomed (Discovery+), and feature documentary Minnesota Mean. Previous work includes the short documentary Red Lake, which premiered at the 2016 LA Film Fest and was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the 2016 IDA awards. M'Daya had the pleasure of being a contributing editor at the 2019 Sundance Documentary Lab and is a 2022-2023 Karen Schmeer editing fellow. Born in Paris to an Algerian father and an American mother, life-long cross-cultural musings have informed her artistic path. When she is not chasing after her little one, she is plotting to subvert the system one cut at a time.
Diana Diroy | Editor
Diana Diroy is a documentary editor and cinematographer. She has a love for storytelling both behind the lens and in the edit room. Diroy, a Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow (2022), is currently editing the feature documentary, Standing Above the Clouds. In 2019, she edited the short version of the film, which won Best Documentary Short at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Diroy was selected for 2021-22 Sundance Art of Editing Fellowship and the Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room Program in 2018. Her cinematography work has screened at Hot Docs, Sundance Film Festival, and CAAMFest. Her work reflects her interests in social justice, climate change, immigration, gender and identity. Diroy is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and continuously strives to collaborate, build community, and make magic with other creatives locally and remotely.
Peter Yearwood | Co-Producer, Associate Impact Producer, Reality Poet
Pete contracted polio as an infant in his home country, Belize, and has lived with a disability his whole life. In 1970, he emigrated to Brooklyn and met the mother of his children. When that relationship ended, Pete fell into the street life, using and selling drugs. In 2015, many years sober, Pete moved into Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center, where he met his OPEN DOORS brothers, aka the Reality Poets. He is both a member and manager of the group, which now includes women. Pete played the role of narrator in the play FADE, based on the Reality Poets’ true stories. FADE premiered at the Main Street Theatre on Roosevelt Island in 2019. Pete’s poetry has been published in literary journals, and he has led poetry workshops for youth and people with disabilities. As a member of the Coler Task Force and the Moving Forward Coalition, Pete advocates for nursing home residents' rights.
Sarah Feuquay | Co-Producer
Sarah Feuquay is a freelance producer based in Brooklyn with 15 years experience working on a wide range of film and television projects. Most recently she led operations, distribution, and business activities for Fork Films, a nonfiction film production company. In her work she draws from her experience working across a diversity of projects, from indie narrative features to primetime ABC News specials, functioning in multiple roles including production coordinating, logistics, research, licensing, post-production, development and grant writing. In addition, Sarah has worked both front- and back-of-house positions at film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films and DOC NYC. She holds a master’s degree in film studies from Emory University and a bachelor’s in film production from Hunter College.
Vincent Pierce | Musician, Impact Strategist, Reality Poet
Born and raised in Newburgh, New York, at a time when the city held the state record for homicides, Vince got involved in the street life at a young age. After a bullet put him in a wheelchair in his late twenties, Vince moved to Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center on Roosevelt Island. After years living in the city-run facility, with scant resources and opportunity, Vince joined the arts-and-justice initiative OPEN DOORS and began to write poetry and focus on his first love, music. In 2019 Vince produced his first album with fellow members of the organization. As a member of the Reality Poets, Vince has met with hundreds of youth in underserved communities and performed for audiences of all ages and backgrounds. With a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation Vince started ZING!, a music program aimed to keep kids off the streets and in the studio. He is composing music for the forthcoming documentary Fire Through Dry Grass. Vince is the founder of the Nursing Home Lives Matter movement which seeks to protect nursing home residents and workers who have been systematically disempowered and endangered by public officials and health care administrators. #NursingHomeLivesMatter
Alexandra Lenore Ashworth | Associate Producer
Alexandra Lenore Ashworth aka Dzana (they/she, b. 1992, Oregon) is an American born, Filipinx, Jewish, adopted artist, filmmaker, and writer and a 2022 Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellow.While working with award-winning production team RAVA Films, Dzana produced for institutions such as PBS/Art21, the MET, Tate, and MOMA, and she has independently directed for Wellcome, Brooklyn Museum, and Henie Onstad Center. Dzana also lends their communications and producing skills to community organizations such as arts-and-justice initiative OPEN DOORS NYC, immigration rights organizers Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP), and the Abolish ICE NY-NJ Coalition. She also organizes and makes art with a collective of adopted, fostered, and trafficked people envisioning the abolition of systems of family policing and separation. Dzana is a National Geographic Explorer, and a proud member of Writers Guild of America, East, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and the Asian American Documentary Network. They also enjoy swimming, fishing, and scifi and fantasy fiction.
Rosemary McDonnell-Horita | Impact Producer
Rosemary McDonnell-Horita (she/her) is a disabled Japanese-American woman living in the East Bay of California. She’s been supporting, advocating, and fiercely fighting for disability inclusion for 10+ years. In 2018 Rosemary ran Colorado’s inaugural Youth Leadership Forum for students with disabilities, in partnership with local independent living centers. With a focus in youth transition and event accessibility, Rosemary has experience working with the CA Youth Leadership Forum (YLF), the Impact Campaign for the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, Google, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and numerous others. Her most recent work includes consulting on impact campaigns, delivering training on intersectionality with a disability justice lens. Those close to Rosemary know her as a conductor of collective access, curator of playlists and lover of justice.
Guillermo Mena | Concept Artist and Animator
Guillermo Mena is a visual artist and animator, born in Los Cóndores, Córdoba, Argentina. He holds a BFA from the Libero Pierini Fine Arts School from Río Cuarto and a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Siglo 21 from Córdoba. His work has been shown in Museums in Argentina, including the Caraffa Fine Arts Museum, the Genaro Pérez Fine Arts Museum, and the Rene Bruseau Fine Arts Museum. Various solo and group exhibitions include the Gachi Prieto Gallery (Buenos Aires), Luogo Gallery (Rafaela), and RAF Gallery (San Martin). He is currently part of the permanent artist staff of Gachi Prieto Gallery and received the National Fund for the Arts grant from Argentina Government on two occasions (2017-2019). In 2020 he participated in the Late Winter Residency Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Other residencies to highlight are EAC, Montevideo, Uruguay (2019) and ACE Foundation in Buenos Aires (2018). He was the animation director and animator for the VR Shortfilm and Series 4 Feet High (Sundance 2021, La Biennale de Venezia 2021, SXSW Jury Award and Audience Award Winner 2021). He works and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Gene Back | Composer
Gene Back is a Korean-American film composer and multi-instrumentalist. The first American composer to have been selected as a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Breakthrough talent, his scores include critically acclaimed feature films COWBOYS (dir. Anna Kerrigan) and HOLLER (dir. Nicole Riegel). Also an artist-in-residence and National Advisory Council co-chair at the Ucross Foundation, his work spans across film music, theatre, XR, instrumental compositions, and songwriting. As a classically trained violinist and self-taught guitarist, Gene was a former live member of the electronic/folk band, The Books, and toured internationally with bands such as Gotye and Explosions in the Sky. For over 15 years, he has recorded with artists ranging from indie songwriters to Talib Kweli, and has composed music for dozens of major global advertising campaigns for Mercedes Benz, Squarespace, Google, Netflix, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, among others. Gene also loves cycling, the natural world, and continues to dream of horse ranching in Wyoming.
Sara Bolder | Executive Producer
Sara Bolder produced the 2021 Oscar nominated documentary, Crip Camp, which also received the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for U.S. Documentary, the 2021 Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature Documentary and a 2021 Peabody Award. Earlier in her career, Sara spent twenty years as a film and sound editor, working on Star Wars Episode One, The English Patient, Terminator 2, The Horse Whisperer, Mrs. Doubtfire and many other films. She won Golden Reel Awards from the Motion Picture Sound Editors for Best Sound Editing for Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan and was nominated for 9 other films. Feeling the pull of her activist youth, Sara changed careers and spent the next fifteen years as a fundraiser at various non-profit social justice organizations including Death Penalty Focus, Progressive Jewish Alliance and MoveOnPAC. Sara was a 2018 Sundance Creative Producing Summit Fellow.
Jim LeBrecht | Executive Producer
James LeBrecht has over 40 years of experience as a film and theater sound designer and mixer, filmmaker, author and disability rights activist. He co-directed and co-produced, with Nicole Newnham, the 2021 Oscar nominated documentary, Crip Camp. The film received the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for feature length documentary, a 2021 Independent Spirit Award and a 2021 Peabody Award. Jim is the founder of Berkeley Sound Artists, an audio post production house. His film credits include Minding the Gap, The Island President, The Waiting Room, Audrie and Daisy and, of course, Crip Camp. A complete list of his film credits (over 180) can be viewed HERE. Jim’s work as an activist began in high school and continued at UC, San Diego, where he helped found the Disabled Students Union. Jim is currently a board member at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. He is a founding member of FWD-Doc, an organization that supports documentary filmmakers with disabilities, and a member of the Disability Futures Fellowship, an initiative of the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
