Fae Pictures, cinematic content that aims to decolonize Hollywood

Media production company Fae Pictures, lead by Shant Joshi, was born with the mission to decolonize Hollywood by creating cinematic content for, by, and about queer, trans, and BIPOC people. Last Canneseries, the company featured "Streams Flow From A River" (6x14’) a premium family drama series about a Chinese Canadian family that, after having been separated for 10 years, are forced to come together in their rural hometown in Canada. "Each one of the members of the family, the mother, the daughter, the father and the son, have their own complicated relationship with each other, and that can be very generic. But what’s unique about this story is that their trauma and difficulties are rooted in the fact that they are Chinese immigrants, and how that, in not such an obvious way, affects them," affirmed Shant Joshi to Señal News.

The series, created by writer and director Christopher Yip, describes the difficulties of navigating a new country as immigrants and building a life for the next generation. The father in the series buys a laundromat, hoping that it will bring wealth to his family. The mother is trying to keep everything together and trying to reconcile the family. The daughter is trying to find sanity and semblance within her family, but she finds none; and the son is just trying to survive. "What's great about the episodic format is that we're able to explore the lives of these characters, and the reasons why they have parted ways with each other, and why they need to come together," stated Joshi.

“Streams Flow From A River” premiered on Super Channel in Canada and was able to connect with the Asian Canadian community. "We have talked to larger communities, supporting the series," added the Fae Pictures president. "We see short film series as an opportunity to develop talent, develop IPs with exciting potential, and share important stories that may otherwise not get an opportunity to get seen," said Joshi.

PROJECTS IN PIPELINE
Currently, Fae Pictures has a slate of new projects in development. One of them is a premium series drama about a Chicago-based union building show. It's about a hotel in Chicago where a union wants to build a presence, but they need to convince 80% of the workers to agree to sign up, and they have to do so without letting management know. "In Europe, and in France specifically, we're having all these conversations about labour and workers, but in America, it is such a different landscape," Joshi described.

Fae Pictures is also working on a spin-off of a feature film that the company will launch later this year, and it's about an Egyptian teenager that moves to Toronto to become a drag queen. "We're spinning off the ending of that film into a series about a bunch of drag queens building a new bar in Toronto – drag entrepreneurship basically," he said.

Last but not least, Fae Pictures is working with a hilarious indigenous comedy duo on a non-scripted comedy series, where they explore specific colonial spaces, masquerading as people in positions of power in order to gain access and really confront colonial injustice.