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“squatter”

SQUATTER is a dark comedy about a 19-year-old whose attempt to protect her mother sets off a chain of events that veers into the grotesque, the liberating, and the unexpectedly funny. The film moves between the plainness of everyday domestic life and the warped intensity of Ramona’s internal world— a blend that mirrors how violence actually operates in families: not as cinematic spectacle, but as something absurd, numbing, and quietly disastrous.

director’s statement

This film is about a 19-year-old girl who does something we're all taught never to do: she gets angry. Not the kind of anger you can tuck away or dress up…the real thing. The kind that erupts when every adult has failed you, every system has turned its back, and every rule about how you're supposed to act just... breaks.

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 put you right there—inside that 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.

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. SQUATTER offers clarity, honesty, dark humor, intelligence— and a point of view shaped by someone who lived close enough to this world to understand its contradictions.

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.