As anti-trans legislation and hostility escalate nationwide, a group of diverse dads, building a nascent movement to support their trans and gender expansive kids, are forced to make an impossible choice: stay and fight or flee the U.S.
Inspired by the Emmy-Award winning short documentary of the same name (Netflix, 2023), THE DADS chronicles a diverse group of dads working to build a movement advocating for their trans and nonbinary children. As a new right-wing administration and conservative Supreme Court roll back transgender rights, the dads must find a way to fight back, protect their children and themselves, and hold on to their growing movement, even as some dads are forced to choose between family and country. Filmed over the course of a year spanning retreats in rural Maine and Minnesota, court dates, protests, family milestones and a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court decision, THE DADS captures this moment of national reckoning with remarkable intimacy through verite footage and interviews with the film’s main protagonists and their families. This is fatherhood as an act of radical love and resistance.
LUCHINA FISHER is the Emmy Award-winning director and producer of THE DADS, about five fathers of trans kids bonding on a weekend fishing trip. The short documentary, executive produced by Dwyane Wade and acquired by Netflix, received the 2024 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Program and a Special Recognition Award from GLAAD. Her directorial debut, MAMA GLORIA, about a Black trans elder activist, was nominated for a 2022 GLAAD Media Award and broadcast on PBS. She is also the director of the award-winning short documentary TEAM DREAM, executive produced by Queen Latifah, and co-director of the award-winning feature documentary LOCKED OUT, about the barriers to Black homeownership. She is currently finishing a feature-length documentary with some of the dads from her Emmy-winning short and a project about the unsung history of Black queer presence in music, which won the 2023 PitchBLACK Film Forum. Luchina began her career as a journalist, writing for The Miami Herald, People and ABC News, and is a 2026 inductee of the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame. She is a visiting professor in film at Fairfield University and has taught documentary filmmaking at Yale. She is a member of the Television Academy and serves on the board of New York Women in Film and Television.
Premiere Available
Producer / Cast - Stephen Chukumba
Executive Producer - Dwyane Wade
Cast - Wayne Maines
Cast - Christoph Heinzer
Cast - Ed Diaz
