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. to protect their families.
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 hope and 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 resistance.
LUCHINA FISHER (she/her) is an Emmy Award-winning director, producer and writer whose work is at the intersection of race, gender and identity. Her latest film, the short documentary THE DADS, about five fathers of trans kids bonding on a weekend fishing trip, won the 2024 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Program and received GLAAD’s Special Recognition Award. The film was executive produced by Dwyane Wade and acquired by Netflix. Her feature directorial debut MAMA GLORIA, about a Black transgender elder activist, was a 2022 GLAAD Media Award nominee 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. Her new project about the unsung history of Black queer presence in music was the winner of the 2023 PitchBLACK Film Forum. Fisher, who started her career as a journalist, is also the director of two scripted short films and has written and produced several nationally broadcast documentaries. The founder of Little Light Productions, she also teaches documentary filmmaking at Yale University.
Premiere Available
Producer / Cast - Stephen Chukumba
Executive Producer - Dwyane Wade
Cast - Wayne Maines
Cast - Christoph Heinzer
Cast - Ed Diaz
