people watching pictures + 98 art collective proudly present
“squatter”
DONATE
+
+
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
This film follows a 19-year-old girl who does the thing we’re all taught not to do: she gets angry. Not a contained or presentable anger, but the real kind— the kind that rises when every adult has failed you, every system has turned away, and the rules about how you’re supposed to behave simply stop holding.
I've watched people I love learn to live with the unbearable because speaking up felt more dangerous than staying quiet. With this film, I want to bring the audience into the moment when everything finally snaps. Not to make it dignified or neat, but to show you what it actually feels like: messy, strange, and sometimes, against all logic, darkly funny.
Because here's the thing about trauma: it's absurd. The way it sits next to the ordinary. The way you can be drowning and still have to take out the trash, answer texts, pretend everything's fine. Squatter refuses to treat violence like a solemn, cinematic event. It lives in the uncomfortable truth that horror and humor aren't opposites: they're neighbors. Sometimes the only sane response to the insane is to laugh, even if that laugh sounds unhinged.
One in three women experience violence from a partner. One in four teenagers face abuse in their relationships. Most never report it. Most never even tell anyone. The story just ends in silence.
Squatter asks: what if someone fought back? And what if that fight didn't look heroic or clean, but grotesque? Liberating? What if it was all those things at once—ugly and freeing and so extreme it almost becomes funny? That's the moment we almost never see, especially with Black women, with femme people, with anyone society has already decided should stay quiet. The full force of their anger. The mess of it. The relief.
In my last film, I worked from a place of stillness. This time, I wanted to go somewhere wilder: into the charged, impossible feelings that live inside our femme and Black bodies but get flattened into stereotypes or melodrama.
Ramona gets to be contradictory, excessive, alive. The quiet ache of watching someone you love destroy themselves. The helplessness of not being able to stop it. The rage. The bizarre humor that keeps you from disappearing completely.
Not a tragedy. Not a triumph. Something messier and more real.
Raw. Vulnerable. Fierce.
Grotesque. Funny. And fully, defiantly human.
CALL TO ACTION
All donations to SQUATTER are fully tax-deductible through our fiscal sponsor, The Gotham Film & Media Institute of NYC. We’ve already raised half of our production budget, and we are now seeking the final $10,000 needed to complete the film with integrity and care.
Your donation directly supports:
- Safe, ethical production practices
-
Crew wages and full SAG compliance
-
Gear rentals from Handheld Films and FunTon Lighting (NYC)
-
Location rental costs
-
Our SPFX producer’s rate
-
Post-production that protects the story’s emotional truth
-
Outreach screenings with DV-prevention organizations
-
Educational conversations about generational trauma and youth anger
If you believe stories like this matter, and that confronting generational violence can be powerful, funny, and unexpectedly freeing, please help us complete SQUATTER.
Even $10, $25 goes a long way.
donate
THE FILM’S IMPACT
This is not a trauma movie. This is a rupture movie— a story about breaking generational patterns instead of inheriting them. The film confronts domestic violence without sensationalizing it, explores the quiet repetitions of generational trauma, treats anger as a legitimate survival response, and follows teenage girls reclaiming control in a world determined to deny they have any. It also exposes the absurdity built into systems that claim to “protect” families but rarely do.
Most films won’t tell this truth, and the ones that try often get it wrong. SQUATTER offers something different: clarity, honesty, dark humor, intelligence— and a point of view shaped by someone who lived close enough to this world to understand its contradictions, its silence, and its breaking points.