*Most Innovative Storytelling Award, Winner Our Pride Shorts Fest

Unsung: Queer Portraits of Authenticity and the Cost of Its Absence is a meditative short film amplifying the voices of four LGBTQ+ individuals as they reflect on what it means to live truthfully in the face of silence, shame, and inherited erasure.

Set within the quiet intimacy of a shared domestic space, Unsung unfolds through layered conversations, gestures, and quiet candor — an intergenerational chorus of memory and becoming. As its subjects navigate queerness, identity, ancestry, and healing, the film offers a tender portrait of authenticity in process. It invites viewers to consider how the truths we suppress shape us — and how the ones we express might set us free. By centering quiet, intentional presence over narrative climax, Unsung becomes a slow, luminous act of resistance: an ode to chosen family, radical honesty, and the stories we carry forward when we’re finally seen.

The cast:

Gail Marlene Schwartz— Writer / Performer Gail is a dual citizen, relationship artist, and author of several books, including Falling Through the Night and My Sister’s Girlfriend.

Antmen Pimentel Mendoza — Poet / Cultural Worker ​antmen is the Director of the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley and author of the chapbook My Boyfriend Apocalypse.

Aris Hearth — Healer / Writer A lover of Appalachia and writer of the Substack newsletter "A Perspective of Leaves," Aris practices divination to make sense of a constantly-changing world.

Dalia Kinsey — Registered Dietician / Public Speaker Dalia is a non-binary, pansexual, Black Registered Dietitian, speaker, podcaster, and writer, known for their book Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation.

From the co-directors: Kimberly Warner & Troy Ford: Unsung was born from a deep longing to create space — space for stillness, for softness, for the kinds of truths that rarely fit into neat narrative arcs. We wanted to make a film that could hold the weight of silence and the quiet power of being seen. As co-directors, we arrived at this project from different but deeply connected places. Troy’s experience as a gay man — and as founder of QStack, a platform amplifying LGBTQ+ authors — gave this film its spine: a commitment to voice, visibility, and community-based storytelling. His lens is one that sees queerness not as a singular identity but as a multiplicity, as chorus. For me, the journey into Unsung was shaped by a long-held sensitivity to how the circumstances of our lives — family, culture, trauma, care — live in the body. I was interested in how authenticity is not just an idea but a physical state. Many of the participants in this film live with chronic illness or mental health conditions that, like their queerness, resist fixing. They are, like all of us, a process. And we wanted the form of the film to reflect that: unfixed, unfolding, alive. Together, we envisioned a film that moves with care, with breath, and with reverence for what can happen when queer and trans people are invited to speak — not in defense or performance, but in truth.

Unsung is a meditation, a ritual, a portrait of what it means to risk being known. What we suppress harms us. What we express sets us free. This film is an offering toward that freedom.

Edited by: Michael Wolcott with Sanctum Films