By Liv Handmade creates garments from old, often stained, deemed useless pieces of fabric. Liv stitches them together to create something new out of all these discarded, imperfect things. In a heap on the floor, it doesn’t look like these base elements go together. They’re contradictory - a mish mash of different patterns, time periods, styles and materials. And yet, she takes needle and thread and she binds them together. What she creates is a new piece which seems to find its value in this depth of texture, in its contradictory elements, in the disproven assumption that “this shouldn’t work” and then, somehow against expectation, it does. Liv likewise is at a stage in her life when she’s piecing things together. We call these years the “formative” ones - that period when we’re more potential than actual. Our identities aren’t fully baked - they’re in process, currently being figured and stitched from a heap of attempts and ideas and desires strewn across the floor. We were struck by the idea of making a project for Liv one night at her apartment. A handful of girlfriends had come over to do a clothing swap. It’s the kind of night I think of when I think of Liv and it looked the way you’d imagine: a dream collaged out of a Sophia Coppola movie - all pastels and lace, dancing on mountains of clothes, loud music, shared confessions, teeth stained with red wine. It’s the kind of night we'll look back on and feel is inseparable from the experience of our early 20’s - that time when your girlfriends are your most reliable compasses, the mirrors you hold up to yourself to find out who you are and who you’d like to be. At its core, this project is a portrait of that time between youth and the rest of our lives. It’s about feeling that you've left where you’ve come from and haven’t figured out where you're going - but you know you'll never be here again. And you know that once it’s over, the only thing you’ll wish for is that you could come back.

Julia is a Brooklyn based director of narrative and commercial work. The daughter of an architect and lighting designer, Julia grew up being carried around construction sites in a 5-gallon bucket. She ate her morning cereal with burly contractors, wiry electricians and frazzled, sleep-deprived parents who could never figure out where they put the drawings. It’s likely she was always destined to have too many opinions and a compulsion to critique every built environment she walks into even though absolutely nobody asked. When Julia decided she wanted to be a director, she thought she was rebelling against the family trade until she realized that films are a lot like buildings. They’re almost impossible to make, they take a huge amount of people and skill sets to put together, and to stand tall on their own, they require a vision that’s able to carry them through complications and setbacks, taking each curve ball and turning it into something that adds to the structural integrity, instead of wears it down. Julia doesn't remember a lot of the finished buildings from her youth but what she does remember is the ever-present movement towards them. For better or worse, that process of creation is the same barometer by which she’s come to measure her own life. Her mood is entirely dependent on the status of her next project and all of her friends are forced to cope with this hazardous fact. At 27, Julia has directed commercial work for clients such as Columbia Records, the US Air Force, UMass, and more. Last year she was shortlisted for the Young Director Award at Cannes and earned 8 nominations across three projects at the Berlin Commercial Film Festival. She’s developing her first feature documentary and is in pre production for a narrative short set to shoot later this year. Nina Gofur is an NYC based director, cinematographer and photographer. Her work is rooted in visceral images of the body and often explores themes of vulnerability and adolescence through non-linear narratives. Her mission is to honor the stories she tells and move the viewer. Working mainly with analog mediums, Nina wants to push the boundary of storytelling that will allow new perspectives to surface. Growing up between Central America, Zimbabwe and Russia, Nina has always sought to uncover the meaning of home. Her most prominent childhood memory is the ever-changing landscape from an airplane window, which unlocked a fervent curiosity for each new environment she was dropped into. The process of documentation became a means to understand and seek the invisible thread between humans and their surroundings. Inspired by filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Agnes Varda, Nina found solace through her viewfinder. The act of seeing became imbued with love and, in turn, a way to feel at home. While she now proudly calls Brooklyn her home, her love for documenting and storytelling has carried into her work, and she feels the most at home on a set, creating with long-time collaborators and new ones. When she isn’t filming, Nina moonlights as a DJ. Her passion for music parallels her passion for film in the way that both seek to create space for people to be moved and come together.