Fort Maria

Winner, Best Narrative Film - Ashland Independent Film Festival

Winner, Best Cinematography - Ashland Independent Film Festival

Winner, Best Director - Bend Film Festival

"Shot in silvery black-and-white by writer-directors S. Cagney Gentry and Thom Southerland, Fort Maria is what the filmmakers call "an unscripted filmic experiment" — a description that might suggest something arch or humorless. But it's neither, avoiding heavy-handed artifice and narrative cliche and finding the tenderness, fire and everyday absurdity beneath its contained-verging-on-deadpan surface." -- The Hollywood Reporter

A film by Thomas Southerland and S. Cagney Gentry

Produced by Paul Harrill

Maria is a woman with no country. A Bulgarian immigrant and adoptive mother of a black daughter, she finds herself suddenly stricken with agoraphobia following a break-in at her home in Kentucky. When her daughter’s aging dog dies, Maria’s confinement puts her into equally painful and funny situations that soon entangle her neighbors.

​As Maria copes with the issues that have led her - a world traveler - into her self-inflicted prison, her daughter Meredith discovers her own identity through a search for her biological family. 

88 minutes 2018