Enjoy Indie Documentaries
Illuen uses a slow, patient, and thoughtful production process to create documentaries about interesting people with passionate beliefs.
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Dance Became My Voice (2023)
Dance Became My Voice is a documentary film that honors the work of dance choreographer Tony C. Johnson. Told through a number of short vignettes featuring dancers that have worked with Tony, the movie offers an intimate and revealing look at the inspirations and ideas that drive Tony’s work. The movie ultimately gives audiences an example of an artist living out his life’s mission and serving a community in a subtle yet remarkably profound way. Here’s some more writing about the project.
DreamxAmerica (2021)
The DreamxAmerica documentary short film – part of the award-winning national initiative bringing together film + social impact – follows the stories of three immigrant, refugee, and first-generation entrepreneurs building small businesses, and close-knit communities, in American towns and cities.
Senior Night (2018)
A film by David Delaney Mayer, Senior Night is a retelling of the final basketball game of a graduating high school senior. Using interior monologue from the protagonist, the piece juxtaposes the high-energy of a basketball game with the melancholy of personal regret, loss, and anxiety about the future. The movie achieves a kind of in-the-moment poetry—a near antithesis of typical sports coverage.
Dance on a Rainy Day (2013)
This is an artfilm David Delaney Mayer made in college on a 16mm Bolex camera. The assignment was to make a short film that incorporated a central action and a natural element. The audio recordings are out of an H4N recorder of a late summer thunderstorm in North Carolina.
Guardian Angels (2016)
Guardian Angels follows a charity worker and a single mother of three as they navigate everyday life during Christmastime in Maidenhead, England. This was a student project with funding from the Benenson Award in the Arts.
Questions For My Grandfather (2014)
David Delaney Mayer's student film as an undergraduate at Duke University, Questions for For My Grandfather, follows Mayer's quest to learn more about the grandfather he never met. His grandfather Paul Mayer was born to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and grew up under the Nazi regime before immigrating to the United States.