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Conversations with PPSL Alumni

MALADAPTIVE
Petra Popper-Freedman, 2024 Fellow
HADLEY'S HOME
Kailey Morand, 2023 Fellow

Click below to read conversations with our PPSL alumni!

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Elshadai Aberra, 2024 PPSL Fellow, Film: Growing Mad in the Midwest

What was your PPSL film about?
“Growing Mad in the Midwest is a collage of my life. It’s a personal essay film about my experience in the Midwest as an Ethiopian immigrant struggling with depression. It’s also about my experience as a depressed child and not being able to process that and it’s a film that’s about memory and the past and how that intersects with the present. The film was somewhat me processing all of that in the process of creating it.”

What did you gain from your PPSL experience?
“PPSL completely changed my Northwestern experience. I think looking back on college, this will be the most important thing that I’ve done. It helped me learn a lot about myself and my limits. PPSL and the director, Ines, helped me learn to lean into my creativity and my storytelling and to trust my instincts. It just showed me that I can make stuff and that I have something to say.”

Do you think your experience creating a film with PPSL will influence your future work and how you approach filmmaking?
“Completely, in every single way. I feel like moving forward, I’ll always really focus on being as genuine as possible throughout the entire process. It helped me reapproach vulnerability with mental health and what it means to be honest versus pushing too far. I feel like I am more mature and that I trust myself to make work about sensitive topics because of all the conversations we had and watching other students make films about really sensitive topics. I’ll always carry that with me – authenticity and sensitivity and thoughtfulness with creating. I think I want to make vulnerable honest work forever. I feel really lucky that this was my first film grant experience.”

Shawn Antoine II, 2025 Fellow, Film: The Red Line  

What was your PPSL film about? 
“My PPSL film, “The Red Line” examines mental health through the lens of the Red Line CTA train in Chicago. I documented the daily commute for someone that would take the train from Howard, the most northern stop all the way to the most southern stop, the 95th Street train station. I had the opportunity to observe what commuters look like, what the environment of the train is like along this train ride, and also I got a chance to interview a couple of fellows that take the train and get their perspective about where the train has gone over the last couple of years and how it’s transformed.” 

What did you gain from your PPSL experience? 
“We were very fortunate to have some great guest speakers that not only advised us on filmmaking techniques but also spoke to us about mental health. As I was filming and even developing the idea of this film, mental health and mental health concerns were at the forefront. Not only the subjects and the environment, but also my own, am I approaching this film in the right mentality, in the right perspective? I would say PPSL definitely aided me in that. And then being in a space where everyone is trying to produce films with the focus of mental health was definitely a special environment, a special opportunity. PPSL created a great cohort for 2025 of filmmakers that were intentional about their works.” 

Was there anything unexpected that came from the program? 
“I didn’t know what to expect. It was just an idea, cultivated from my times of taking the train. That was no plan, but the energy of the train really took me on the journey. It was like, let’s go for the ride, let’s see what happens. I think that was a special thing about it. In observational documentaries, you shouldn’t know what to expect. You should find out. So, I would say the unexpected was expected. That’s a part of the process.” 

Naya Hemphill, 2024 PPSL Fellow, Film: Quicksand  

What is your film about?
“Quicksand is about a mother of two who is faced with her untapped potential one day and it causes her to question her life choices” 

What did you gain from your PPSL experience? 
“I learned how to best portray mental health, not only from my own project but from everyone in the class, just how to take serious subjects and use them creatively to be effective

Sophia Jackson, 2025 PPSL Fellow, Film: Echo Only No Such Thing

What was your PPSL film about? What themes about mental health were you trying to address?
“My PPSL film was called “Echo Only No Such Thing” and it was about integration in Evanston. There was a former prominent black community in the fifth ward, and it was about the strength and love and sense of the togetherness that was present in that community. They couldn’t go to the white doctors, so they built their own, right? And they had their own YMCA and they had everything they needed, according to some of the participants. With integration, they lost that, and then with that, came a loss of sense of community, loss of a sense of togetherness. Integration’s painted as this only positive thing sometimes when I think it’s more complicated than that.

When it comes to mental health, we are quick to just look at an individual and maybe their immediate circumstances. I think things are changing a lot now in a lot of different communities in terms of that sense of togetherness, that sense of belonging or the physical staples of that community and I think that that plays a big role in mental health.”

What were some challenges you faced?
“I think one of the challenges was trusting yourself. You don’t have to ask for permission to be creative in a certain way. I think that was a thing that I’ll take with me wherever I go – trusting your own creative voice. One of the beautiful things about this class was that there was no blueprint to follow. It was really just ‘You get to express yourself and then we’ll support you and offer real feedback.’”

How do you see PPSL impacting your career or your perspective as a filmmaker?
“PPSL made me realize how much I loved the filmmaking space, especially working on documentaries and meeting Professor Sommer who does vérité documentaries. It made me feel like “Oh, this is the place that I like to be.” which isn’t a feeling I often get. I feel like ‘Okay, maybe I’m unsure about what my future holds, but I know that I love this,” which I think is rare thing. I’ll always have that. It definitely helped to solidify my desire to keep making films.”

What are you working on now?
“Right now, I am working at the Family Centered Educational Agency, a nonprofit in South Holland. It mainly works with first generation low income students in the area. In addition to doing photo and video work, I’m also working on a long form piece over the next academic year. So, a documentary about the organization and the history of the organization and I’m spotlighting a few students and just trying to let their stories shine.”
Blake Knecht, 2025 PPSL Fellow, Film: silent harbor

What was your PPSL film about?
“My PPSL film was an experimental short film. It was a correspondence between a lighthouse and a lost sailor, and it took place along the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. It touched on scenes of grief and loss and searching for peace in hard times.”

Do you have a favorite memory from the experience?
“Filming the project, I took a road trip all the way up from Chicago around the lake up to Mackinac Island and back down. And it was such an experience for me, not being from the Midwest, being able to experience so much of the Midwest through this kind of unique lens of visiting all of the lighthouses and also just really reflecting on my own experiences and questions about grief. So, I think from the experience I was able to connect with a new place in a really intimate way.”

What did you gain from your PPSL experience?
“I think PPSL is such a great experience because our cohort was very open with their own experiences with mental health and in their projects. So, being able to collaborate with them, being able to talk with them so openly was extremely beneficial. You don’t always get the opportunity to collaborate with other people in such a capacity. I think that really not only helped the process of making this particular film, but I learned so much from each of their individual films and filmmaking sensibilities. I think it was the cohort at PPSL that really helped push me as a filmmaker.”

Kailey Morand, 2023 PPSL Fellow, Film: Hadley’s Home

What is your film about?
“My PPSL film was called Hadley’s Home. It followed a little girl named Emma who was seven years old when her sister Hadley returned from the hospital after a mental health episode. It explores the family dynamics within a female family unit after an intense mental health event.”

How has PPSL influenced what you are doing now?
“I am writing a play called “Crashing In” that will be produced in February. It also centers a female family unit but is more focused on addiction. I know that my PPSL education has helped me come up with this idea and is helping me to write the play. I also got into the Sundance Film Festival Experience – though the School of Communication – I attribute most of what I had to talk about in the application to PPSL. “

What were the challenges of your PPSL experience?
“Being one of the less experienced artists in the cohort, at least in film, I was doing a lot of things for the first time. The biggest challenge was working through all of the imposter syndrome that’s associated with being allowed to do something so awesome.

Paul O’Connor, 2025 PPSL Fellow, Film: Deliverance

What is your PPSL film about?
“My film is called ‘Deliverance’, and it’s about a pizza delivery driver who’s driving around one night and then runs into a cat who’s tearing down their own missing pet posters. The pizza delivery driver follows the cat and then antics ensue.”

What inspired that topic? What themes about mental health were you trying to address?
“I was a pizza delivery driver and so I wanted to do something about that because I feel it was a very isolating experience, driving through various streets, being on the periphery of all of these people’s lives and playing this side character role.

The film is about empathizing with people or creatures who are facing struggles that you might not understand and also realizing that empathy is how you overcome feelings of loneliness or alienation. That was definitely the journey of the main character, coming from a place of being comfortable in this lonely or alienated state and then experiencing discomfort and growing through that.”

What advice would you give to someone working on a similar project?
“I would say to listen to other people who have completely different ways of approaching and creating work. Even if you’re not interested in doing that yourself, you can still really take something away from someone with a completely different approach.
For instance, I did a narrative film which was script-based, and we rehearsed, but then when things started to go wrong, I had to improvise a little bit in ways that documentary or experimental filmmakers would. There are still things that you can learn from different approaches, and you never know what challenges you’re going to end up having to face and what skills will be helpful.”

Petra Popper-Freedman, 2024 PPSL Fellow, Film: Maladaptive 

What is your PPSL film about?  
“My film is about a person with maladaptive daydreaming attempting to go on a first date. It’s a condition where you excessively daydream to the point where it is detrimental to your life, so in the film you see that impacting her first date quite badly.” 

What did you gain from your PPSL experience? 
“Maladaptive daydreaming is a very internal struggle and so I’ve had difficulties in the past explaining it to my friends and my family. At the end, having this project that is an externalization of this struggle was so lovely.” 

Do you have a favorite memory from PPSL? 
“I loved the premiere because by that point, I had been in such a hole of editing that I forgot that it was a comedy. I was reminded of the fact that it is actually a funny film once I heard the audience laughing. It was the best feeling in the world.” 

Jennifer Ligaya Senecal, 2025 PPSL Fellow, Installation: Buhaya’s Odyssey: That Which Is Guide Toward Her Unweathering

Can you explain what your PPSL project was about?
“I really wanted to look at microaggressions and the way that it not only manifests in the body, but the way that healing from it and the managing of it occurs as well. I wanted to focus on the sensory aspect of the experience, both at the encounter, the realization, and the healing response to those harms. For me, those are social manifestations of larger institutions. So, this was also a way of me doing a form of sensory ethnography around that experience.”

Do you have a favorite memory from your time with PPSL?
“I think one of my favorite memories was when I had first decided that I was going to transition to a projection and I’d brought some of my material into the classroom. It wasn’t really working perfectly, but one of my peers, I think it was Declan, was like, ‘Well, we can look at it this way’. And he kind of brought one of the objects I wanted to project into the frame, and I was first able to see what it would look like, and it was a magical moment that everyone participated in. Everyone was like, “Wow, I can see it. That’s going to look really cool.” It was a first realization moment. I think that sits with me and that that felt really cool. It felt collective, and it was my collective PPSL moment with everyone.”

What are you most proud about your project?
“Oh, that I finished. That I’ve finished and that I feel really excited about it. I feel like it is such a reflection and a beautiful next step for me. That is what I’m most proud about, is that I found a path that feels so right to me and it feels like mine, my fingerprints, something that I’m excited about continuing.”
Nathan Siskel, 2024 PPSL Fellow, Film: Doh, God!

What was your PPSL film about?
 “It is a stop motion claymation animated film about a girl named Lily who is struggling with depression and an existential crisis, which is manifested in her entire world being made of Play-Doh. She sees it as kind of meaningless and all the same, but she learns to find the beauty and absurdity in that.”

Was there any unexpected about the filmmaking process?
 “I was surprised by how good it was for me to make it. I think for me, visual art puts my brain in kind of a meditative or quiet state and I was able to process a lot of the stuff that the film is about and think more about it. Having hours to just be there, moving things little by little, gave me a lot of time to think about my life. And by the end of it, I felt actually a lot more grounded than I had at the start. So that was very surprising, and I loved that.”

What did you gain from the PPSL experience?
“It gave me a really wonderful community. I felt very close to basically every one of the PPSL fellows. We workshopped each other’s films and got to know a lot about each other through the films. It’s a very personal class and I am very grateful for that. I also gained all of their insights. If I was working on it alone, I don’t know if it would have been as meaningful or rich in terms of in terms of the feedback and perspectives that were given.”

What advice would you give to somebody doing a similar project?
 “To go with your gut and go with what you’re passionate about, even if it’s a little strange or a little difficult or unconventional because I think that’s where you’re going to find the most joy and is going to be the most unique and notable for people. I went through stages of thinking ‘my film should be like this because I’ve seen this before or my film should be like this because, this theme is always present in other films about depression’. And I just kept getting advice from people that ‘No, you should do what feels really honest and is fun to you.’ And I think that was great advice.”
Johnaé Strong, 2023 PPSL Fellow, Film: We Have Nothing To Lose

What was your film about?
“My film is ‘We Have Nothing to Lose’, and it’s a chronicle of young, Black, queer organizers responding to the police murder of a child. The themes are generational trauma, community resilience and community power.”

Why did you decide to choose that as your theme or topic?
“There’s not a lot of depictions of Black radical movement in film, and the ones that I’ve seen have been very inaccurate. So, I wanted to do one that was the most authentic given the experiences I’ve had.”

Do you have a favorite memory of either being on set or in class?
“When we were in class, and we were showing our fine cuts of our films. Just to see the different topics that were covered – anxiety, depression, and the aftermath of a suicide attempt. It was good to see all the creative ways in which people were able to connect with these things. It was really impressive.”

What are you working on now? How was it influenced by PPSL?
“I’m continuing with the theme of generational and community resilience in the face of trauma. I’ve started showing my thesis film, which is about the longest continuous running African-centered school in the country and some short pieces around my daughter and her grief process with the passing of her father. I also had an opening of an exhibition with the University of Chicago Arts and Public Life and it was very well attended. It was amazing. So, I’ve just continued to expand on these themes and take them into other fellowships and residencies.”
Lulu Tian, 2023 Fellow, Director of “Design for Our Lives”, Co-founder of Creative Learning Haven

What are you working on now?
“After graduating, I got the chance to work with this group called MIT D-Lab. They wanted to create a documentary about projects that are based around teaching people to design and engineer things with their available resources. They do it all around the world, but I was working in Tanzania and in the refugee camps in Uganda.”

What was your day to day like in this position?
“The day to day was a lot of following people around, but also a lot of learning myself. They’re building different technologies that I also didn’t know much about, so I had to do a lot of learning about electronics and building. Because I spent a lot of time specifically in Uganda, I developed friendships with community members and then we started two libraries. There weren’t any other community public libraries before, and the number one request I got from people was for books. We’re now running two libraries, employing over 10 community members, and we reached over a thousand people in the refugee camps.”

The library program Creative Learning Haven, cofounded by Lulu, can be found @creativelearninghaven or https://creativelearninghaven.org/. You can support the CLH at https://forms.gle/jGzUC9CV1rBaSKbj9.

How did you see mental health or PPSL play a role in this position?
“At the refugee camps, I met a lot of people who have experienced traumatic things. Having the framework of PPSL gave me language to talk about it with people, but also to think about the visual treatment of those things. Based on my exposure to different films in PPSL, I felt like there’s still a big deficit in how mental health is treated, especially in documentary films. I really wanted to resist the poor African refugee narrative because that’s not how I saw anyone that I was working with, and I don’t think that’s how they see themselves. The PPSL experience definitely empowered me to pursue something different from those more traditional narratives.”