Behind the Lens DeLaney Filmmaker-in-Residence Nich Perez invites W&L students into the world of documentary film with two new film projects screening in Stackhouse Theater this spring.

Students take their turn behind the camera during the filming of “The Brownsburg Conversations.”

“I’m here to teach students how to use and create cinematic work not just to entertain but to help and give meaning.”

~ Nich L. Perez, DeLaney Filmmaker-in-Residence

This spring, W&L’s Stackhouse Theater will serve as a premiere venue for two films. On March 25 and again on May 6, DeLaney Filmmaker-in-Residence Nich L. Perez will screen two feature-length documentaries made in close collaboration with W&L students and community members. The films represent not just finished works, but the culmination of a vision Perez has been building since arriving on campus: making real, meaningful documentary filmmaking a hands-on possibility for any interested W&L student.

Perez, went to film school at the USC School and Cinematic Arts and studied documentary at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is also the director and founder of the Nonprofit Film Collective, a grassroots group of volunteer filmmakers that creates media to support communities and organizations around the world. Perez joined the W&L community as the DeLaney Filmmaker-in-Residence with W&L’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communications in 2024; he teaches media production courses on digital journalism, video production and documentary, as well as film studies and screenwriting under the Department of Theater, Dance and Film Studies.

“As a filmmaker, I always say to my students that, ‘I don’t have an Oscar, but I’ve fed thousands of people and helped provide clean and sustainable water across the globe because of the media work I’ve done with my team,’” Perez says.

The idea that storytelling is a form of service shapes everything about how Perez works with students at W&L. Perez says that teaching film in a liberal arts environment offers different opportunities for discovery than teaching at a film school.

“I’m here to teach students how to use and create cinematic work not just to entertain but to help and give meaning,” he says. “W&L is not a film school, but it is still a place where I’d find students who are compassionate and gung-ho about the craft.” Students who are part of these productions earn a professional film credit in their résumé, and on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) after the films are selected and screened in film festivals.

The first of the two upcoming screenings is “KAMAL’S,” a food documentary that follows Chef Kamal Hammouda, a Muslim chef in rural Iowa, and his Catholic wife, Laura Fendt, as they build their restaurant into a vibrant gathering place for their community. The film takes an intimate look at questions of identity, faith, hospitality and democracy, including Hammouda’s run for local political office.

Perez sets up a shot while filming “KAMAL’S.”

The project was years in the making: Perez and his team of students and film professionals, shot approximately 40 hours of footage over three years. Two W&L seniors — Sylvia Agatako ’26 and Joe Lee ’26 — stepped in as assistant editors through independent studies with Perez last semester and helped carve those hours into a coherent narrative. For Agatako, a computer science major from Rwanda, the path to the project was serendipitous. She had taken a documentary film class her first year at W&L, but it wasn’t until she spotted one of Perez’s flyers advertising a student film clinic that she sought him out. She looked up his work on the Nonprofit Film Collective website and was immediately moved.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a film that invokes such emotion in me in a really long time,” she says, “and I thought it would be nice to work on something like this.”

She describes the editing experience as both demanding and deeply rewarding, particularly the responsibility of honoring someone else’s story through the choices she made in the editing process.

“You have a bunch of different clips and so many separated stories,” she says, “and you have to bring them together to create a narrative or tell someone’s story in a way that would do them justice. This experience has just been my way of helping someone else tell their story, but in the same process, learning from them and being the audience, even though I’m trying to tell that story to a different audience.”

The second film, “The Brownsburg Conversations,” takes a different approach. Conceived as an experiment in community-centered storytelling, the documentary brings together residents of Brownsburg, Virginia, to speak with one another on camera about their past, present and hopes for the future. Advanced Documentary students in the fall of 2025 took on editing responsibilities for the film, sifting through footage filmed over a week with community members to build individual scenes. One of the most distinctive contributions to the film came from an entirely unexpected source: junior studio art and French double major Aislyn Franciscovich, who had never worked on a film before.

She was connected to the project through her independent study professor, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Niloofar Gholamrezai, who forwarded her a message from Perez looking for a student animator to bring the film’s historical sequence to life. Perez gave her remarkable creative latitude.

“He really has let me explore animation as a medium,” Franciscovich says. “He told me I had creative freedom on it and to do whatever I wanted in order to animate the sequence and tell the story.”

The one guiding constraint, she says, was historical accuracy. Her animations depict real events in Brownsburg’s past, and she worked from historical photographs and artifacts provided by the Brownsburg Museum, all while simultaneously taking an introductory animation class on campus. The collaboration unfolded iteratively through a shared digital folder, with Perez sending feedback via annotated video cuts and Franciscovich layering in new work as the film evolved. She says that the project introduced her to a resource she hadn’t known existed at W&L.

“Before I started this animation project, I didn’t know that we even had a film director in residence,” she says.

The students who have worked with Perez span disciplines such as computer science, studio art and beyond. Perez emphasizes that the value of the experience of these projects goes far beyond technical skill. For him, what matters most is what students discover about themselves and the communities around them in the filmmaking process.

“I think what’s exciting sometimes is seeing students learn the process,” he says, “and getting to see the transformation and the relationships that they establish with community members, with the people that they work with. You won’t be a good filmmaker if you’re not a good person in the first place.”

Both “KAMAL’S” and “The Brownsburg Conversations” will be submitted to domestic and international film festivals in 2026-2027 including the prestigious DOC NYC and Full Frame after they premiere on campus.

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