The Celebration Will Be Televised
A Case Study of Stand Tall, Go Higher (2026)
Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards
“The film keeps handing its subjects nothing — no money, no crew, no guarantee anyone is watching — and keeps discovering that nothing was never the whole story. Someone was always still there.”
The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking — celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanisms behind why they work.
Content Notice: This Case Study discusses anti-LGBTQ+ hostility, sexual assault, the HIV/AIDS crisis, medical discrimination, and the threat of political violence.
The Claim Has to Meet the People
Footage from a Super 8 camera appears before the filmmakers do.
Old home-movie footage runs beneath an archival voice describing years spent working in small-gauge film before moving into larger productions — years the speaker calls closer to the real center of the work than the features that followed, because they responded directly to lived experience rather than holding it at a professional distance. The voice belongs to Derek Jarman, whose Super 8 practice ran alongside his features and frequently documented the artists and queer social worlds around him.
That opening isn’t the film’s only debt to Jarman. The blue-outs recurring throughout the runtime — brief, wordless fades to a single saturated field of color, used to punctuate transitions between speakers and sections — reproduce the exact Pantone shade of Jarman’s own final film, Blue (1993), a feature composed entirely of that single color behind its soundtrack, made as his eyesight failed near the end of his life. It’s a specific, deliberate homage rather than an incidental palette choice, and it means Jarman isn’t only the film’s opening voice. He’s a visual presence returned to across the entire runtime, credited nowhere on screen.
The archival voice states the film’s thesis before the film has earned it: filmmaking creates family.
Daniel Talbott and Andrew Klaus-Vineyard then begin supplying the family one person at a time.
A roll call of contemporary queer filmmakers introduces itself, and the formality doesn’t last. KC Fralick — Community Partnerships Manager at Queer Film Los Angeles — explicitly consents, on camera, to Daniel using the footage however he wishes. Sydne Horton describes herself as a queer filmmaker delighted to be included, and Erblin Nushi drapes a throw blanket over their head as an improvised hood. A question about identity turns into a joke about how straight everyone in the room is. Jackson Carter Smith raises a pink high heel trophy and produces a mock acceptance speech.
The improvised camera setups don’t standardize the people in front of them. Each becomes an object the participants are free to alter.
Nothing here has yet proven that filmmaking creates family. But it’s more than cast introduction. The subjects know they’re being filmed, and they negotiate the terms, parody the apparatus, and tease the filmmaker before the documentary has asked a serious question. The camera isn’t extracting equivalent testimony from a fixed roster of participants — some in the same room, some dialed in separately. It’s giving everyone present a common surface to leave different marks on.
What Do You Do With Nothing?
Daniel’s first sustained challenge sounds like a game improvised at a party: a hundred dollars, a flashlight, a week, and — for reasons that never stop being funny — a vintage Pucci scarf. How do you make a film no matter what?
The joke clears the way for a harder answer underneath it: assume nobody is coming to help. Don’t wait for a studio, for money, for institutional approval. Identify the story first, then look at who’s already close enough to help make it.
What follows is less a list of tips than a demonstration of conversion — absence turned, one question at a time, into inventory. Who do I know? What location is free? What equipment already exists? Iris Dukatt — a New York-based queer director, writer, and producer trained at NYU Tisch, whose work spans film and live performance — offers the clearest single formulation of the section’s whole logic: don’t fight your frame. A location without a budget to redress it isn’t an obstacle to disguise — it’s the largest piece of production design already on hand, and the film can be shaped around what’s physically present rather than in spite of it.
The same principle governs the human frame. Joey Milberg recalls going door to door at fraternity houses at an SEC school looking for bodies to fill a scene in a gay film; out of roughly two thousand possible recruits, five showed up. Five were enough — blocking and framing did the rest. MT Peralta describes landing on a set through a casual social-media callout, inheriting a role with almost no direction beyond needing to die on camera, and improvising the same collapse three times until the crew was satisfied.
The film doesn’t celebrate the rejection. It celebrates the five who came, and the one who said yes without knowing what the part was.
The constraint eventually turns into something closer to a theory of identity than a production tip. KC Fralick argues that queer people already know how to build meaning out of materials never made for them — language, clothing, genre, inherited images, pulled apart and recombined into something that can hold a life the original arrangement excluded. Queer filmmaking doesn’t improvise only because it lacks money. It improvises because queer existence has repeatedly required building usable forms out of inadequate inheritances.
The section closes on Cheryl Dunye, director of The Watermelon Woman (1996), describing her own arrival at filmmaking as circumstantial — self-taught, driven by the simple fact that no one else was making the specific film she needed to exist. The missing image doesn’t just become her subject. It becomes her method.
Visibility Has to Survive Disagreement
Daniel’s next question is clean; the answers aren’t. Is queer filmmaking inherently radical protest, simply by existing?
Some subjects argue visibility itself is protest, regardless of subject matter — a film about drag activists fighting the government and a quiet film about a relationship count equally, because both contradict systems that prefer queer life to stay invisible. Others resist the word radical outright. Producer Giancarlo Nasi — whose own credits include The Settlers (Chile’s official 2024 Academy Award submission) and the explicitly queer-themed The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, built across more than two decades of international co-production work spanning upward of twenty countries — reserves “radical” for people who risk their safety or lives simply by existing as queer, and admits open, unresolved uncertainty about whether his own substantial body of work has changed anything at all.
The film doesn’t correct him with a more inspiring answer. That restraint matters. A documentary this warm toward its subjects could easily have turned queer identity into an automatic moral credential. This one lets its subjects distinguish between visibility, protest, risk, and harm — acknowledging directly that a queer film can still be a bad one, can still cause harm within its own community, even while its mere existence matters during a period of active erasure.
Erblin Nushi, a non-binary Kosovo-born filmmaker whose short BINI — based on the day their family became refugees during the 1999 Kosovo war — was nominated for a Student Academy Award, adds a different register entirely: protest by invitation rather than confrontation. Nushi describes wanting to give parents an emotionally accessible image of young queer love, something they could recognize and support rather than fear — a project that maps closely onto Nushi’s own work developing a feature aimed at helping parents understand a queer child.
The trans and nonbinary filmmakers push the question toward the body directly: when public existence is actively being regulated, simply appearing as yourself — in makeup, in the clothing that fits, unconcealed — becomes protest whether or not the person chooses that framing for themselves. The radicalism, in this account, is imposed by whoever makes ordinary authenticity dangerous in the first place.
No single definition wins. The film produces a scale instead, and the disagreement is what makes the unity built later feel earned rather than assumed.
Archival Agnès Varda follows the debate with something closer to a method than an answer: an account of what happens to a person the moment they stand in front of a camera, and a stated commitment to approaching that unpredictability with affection rather than control. Placed here, her account reframes the entire opening roll call. The blanket hood, the mock trophy, the jokes and interruptions weren’t noise between the camera and some more authentic version of these people. They were the authentic behavior this specific, affectionate encounter generated.
Memory Has to Become Production Equipment
A new prompt asks what every queer filmmaker needs to turn an uncontrolled location into a personal set. A candle, apparently — always light the candles — followed by the same list in increasingly stripped-down form: a camera, a light, an actor, guts, tenacity.
But the section’s real center is historical. Cheri Gaulke — a pioneer of the 1970s Los Angeles feminist performance art movement affiliated with the Woman’s Building, now decades into a parallel career as a filmmaker — admits to hiring collaborators with technical skills, particularly cinematography, that her own background in visual art, painting, and design doesn’t cover. The people around her refuse to let that read as a gap in her authorship; knowing who to bring in is treated as its own form of directing.
The film then assembles an informal inheritance from queer cinema history, three distinct kinds in quick succession. Archival John Waters — cut against confirmed clips from Female Trouble, Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Pecker, and Serial Mom — offers proof that a film-stock-era budget and zero institutional approval could still find real, if unconventional, distribution. Archival Gregg Araki links the raw anger of the New Queer Cinema movement directly to the AIDS crisis and government abandonment — his films didn’t simply adopt an aesthetic, they processed a specific historical grief. And a segment on Rossy de Palma — not queer herself, but claimed by the subjects as an inherited icon of post-Franco Spanish queer culture — makes the section’s sharpest point without saying it outright: inheritance here isn’t limited to people who share the identity inheriting it.
By the section’s end, “what do you need to make a film” has quietly become “what lineage can you draw on when you have nothing else.”
The Flowers Have to Become a Job
This is the film’s longest sustained argument, and the length is earned.
It opens by exposing a real gap rather than assuming community automatically means self-knowledge. Fralick describes a Pride festival exercise in which attendees were asked to name an underrated queer film on Post-it notes. The two most common answers, unprompted: But I’m a Cheerleader and Brokeback Mountain — a film about as far from underrated as queer cinema gets. The joke is real, but the point underneath it isn’t a joke: even a queer audience’s own reference points for its own history are thinner than the community might assume of itself.
What follows is the film actively repairing that gap, one recommendation at a time, each carrying real personal stakes rather than functioning as a list. Parting Glances (1986) is remembered as writer-director Bill Sherwood’s only completed feature — the film notes that he died of AIDS-related complications shortly after its release. Southern Comfort is remembered for the rural trans community that cared for a beloved elder after medical discrimination turned a treatable illness into a death sentence. Go Fish (1994) — the 1994 feature by Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner — returns repeatedly as evidence that community, intimacy, and formal confidence can share a frame with almost no budget at all; Sydne Horton describes discovering it only after a Cannes photographer kept comparing her filmmaking group to the women in the movie, which is community-as-afterlife in its simplest form — someone remembers the film for you before you know you need it. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar is credited to screenwriter Douglas Carter Beane, a Tony-nominated playwright by primary trade whose sole produced screenplay still visibly matters to the people quoting it three decades later.
One recollection worth crediting precisely: MT Peralta’s account of discovering Velvet Goldmine — watched, in his own words on camera, at “18-ish, and I was a girl” — is a trans viewer’s memory, stated directly. The retrospective recognition the film captures isn’t a coming-of-age reframing; it’s Peralta locating himself, later, inside a film he’d first seen before he had the language for who he was.
Then the section turns, and the turn is the essay’s clearest piece of evidence for its own thesis. One shout-out isn’t just recommendation — it’s employment. Horton, a queer writer-director whose short Saturday Ritual screened at the 2025 Cannes American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and won NewFest’s Best Teen Film Audience Award, is praised by name and singled out specifically, then described as hired directly off that admiration, as director on a subject’s own upcoming feature. Admiration, converted in one traceable step, into a job.
The film immediately tests whether that conversion scales. Archival Kristen Stewart, drawn from a New York Times interview, describes philosophical resistance to studio “committee processes” second-guessing the specificity of a queer character under her direction — a direct collision between community-built creative trust and institutional gatekeeping. In the same stretch, a subject reflecting on hiring and industry economics admits, without resolution, that she’s still trying to figure out how queer filmmakers actually sustain themselves financially. The film doesn’t answer her. It lets the admission stand exactly where she left it.
That’s the real center of the section, and arguably of the film. Community can plainly supply inspiration, crew, memory, permission, and — sometimes, demonstrably — a job. Whether it can supply a living is a genuinely open question, and the film is honest enough to leave it open rather than resolve it for effect.
Joy Has to Circulate
A hand-lettered title card asks the question the back half has been circling: how do you make films flooded with joy during, in one subject’s own phrase, this current dumpster fire?
The answer starts small — deliberately warm color grading, built specifically so a viewer feels safe the instant the image appears — and builds into a loop rather than a single idea: safety permits vulnerability, vulnerability permits real collaboration, collaboration produces joy, and the joy is what ends up on screen. The image isn’t manufacturing joy for an audience’s benefit. It’s recording joy that already happened during the making of it.
From there the section sharpens into open defiance. One participant, disclosing a difficult personal history that includes surviving sexual assault and ongoing recovery, argues that the community’s present need is for joy specifically — because erasing queer celebration is itself the target of current hostility, which makes visible joy a form of resistance rather than a distraction from the fight. That argument recurs across several voices before the section closes, echoing the “we don’t need you, and we never have” defiance heard earlier in the film. Joy here isn’t offered as the opposite of the fight. It’s presented as the fight’s clearest available expression.
The Community Has to Include the People Not Yet Met
The film closes on a formal benediction from Rev. Micah Bucey, a minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, whose stated mission — nurturing artistry in people who might never call themselves artists, treating artists as a kind of modern-day prophet — closely matches the tone of the prayer itself: gratitude for queer storytelling, reassurance against the fear of making something no one will ever see, and a closing image of an audience already waiting somewhere for exactly this story.
That closes the loop the opening set up, deliberately. Jarman’s claim was about the family formed on a film set — closed, temporary, present only for the length of a shoot. Bucey’s prayer imagines a larger, unmet one. The thesis doesn’t resolve so much as widen.
And underneath the eloquence of that closing gesture sits a plainer fact worth naming before the credits: this is a single documentary, shot on no budget, cut together almost entirely out of people who showed up because someone they knew asked them to. The film’s own existence is the last piece of evidence for its own argument. It didn’t only describe community becoming infrastructure. By the plain facts of its own production, it was built that way.
Closing
Stand Tall, Go Higher never claims to solve the problem it spends its back half naming — that admiration, mentorship, and shared history can visibly convert into a job, a film, a rescued piece of memory, but have not yet, by the film’s own admission, reliably converted into a living. Nobody in the film claims otherwise on the community’s behalf, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise for them.
What it offers instead is a working demonstration, sequenced deliberately: a claim asserted before it’s earned, then tested through scarcity, through disagreement, through inheritance, through the specific moment recognition became a job, through the doubt that immediately follows that moment, through joy, and through an audience the film hasn’t met yet. Community, across that sequence, stops being the film’s subject and becomes its method. The celebration isn’t the film’s way of avoiding what it can’t yet solve. By its own honest accounting, it’s the resource that lets the people in it keep working on the problem anyway.
A Note on Sourcing: Kristen Stewart’s remarks, including her “ten people over the age of 50 and male” line regarding a queer character’s presentation, are drawn from a New York Times interview published December 6, 2025.
The governing argument — that the film converts community from subject into production system, and that this conversion is tested rather than merely asserted — is Atlantis’s own interpretation, reasoned from direct viewing and the film’s own construction, not assembled from or dependent on any outside review or official production framing.