Films
A collection of narrative films exploring science, memory, place, and personal history — unified by a focus on human connection and visual storytelling.
Sowing the Seeds of Love | 2024
Sowing the Seeds of Love explores the obscure and often surprising mating behaviors of animals through satire, animation, and pop culture nostalgia. By casting celebrities from the 1970s–90s and shooting partially on 16mm film, the project uses humor to make complex biological concepts more accessible to adult audiences. The film intentionally steps away from traditional documentary structure to demonstrate how creative framing can reduce barriers to science engagement.
Crew: Directed and edited by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young, Cinematography by Zach Robinson, Performances by Joyce DeWitt, Hulk Hogan, Robert Picardo
Screenings and Awards: Boston Film Festival Documentaries Without Borders International Film Festival - Excellence Award Spotlight Documentary Awards - Gold Award WILDsound Feedback Film and Screenplay Festival - Best Story Award 5th Children's Science, Nature & Wildlife Film Festival - Best Documentary Jury (Student) Award
A Landlocked Ocean | 2023
A Landlocked Ocean explores ecological interconnectedness and human impact on marine systems. Created from an inland perspective, the film examines how climate systems, watershed dynamics, and human activity connect even distant communities to ocean health.
Through stop-motion animation and poetic narration, the project reframes the ocean not as a distant entity, but as an integrated system influencing daily life. The film highlights how environmental storytelling can connect abstract climate science to lived experience.
Crew: Directed and edited by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young and Laura Borders-Young, Performed by Lyric Allen, Music by Melissa Borders Allen
Screenings and Awards: Bozeman International Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Nature Now Documentary Film Festival, Student World Impact International Film Festival-Quarter Finalist
The Bee | 2022
A poetic exploration of the female labor sustaining honeybee colonies. Shot in black and white, the film alternates between a bee’s perspective and the clinical stillness of a dissected specimen, marked with handmade labels that trace both anatomical features and social roles assigned from birth. By contrasting the unseen labor of worker bees with the comparatively limited role of males, the film draws a quiet parallel to broader societal expectations around gender and work.
Crew: Directed, written, shot, and edited by Riley Young
Generational Love | 2022
Past voice messages are used as a reflection of love between three generations of women.
The filmmaker uses herself, her mother and grandmother to star in Generational Love to make a film that expresses familial love. She uses voice messages left by her mother and grandmother that she had saved from years prior. She filmed the raw makeup free faces of these women and morphs them together throughout the film to represent the connection of love they all have for one another.
Crew: Directed and edited by Riley Young, Starring Riley Young, Elaine Rock, Laura Borders-Young
Screenings and Awards: Women and Wine Film Festival-Award Winner for Best Experimental Film
Mygama | 2022
Mygama is an intimate portrait of my grandmother, Elaine Rock, as she reflects on a life shaped by hardship, migration, and resilience. Raised on a farm in rural southern Illinois during wartime, Elaine dreamed of a different future — one that eventually led her to California, where ambition and adversity became intertwined. Through personal interviews and family storytelling, the film explores themes of grief, endurance, and generational strength.
Directed by one of her granddaughters, the project centers the perspective of women across generations, examining how resilience is inherited, redefined, and carried forward. At its core, Mygama is a meditation on matriarchy, memory, and the quiet power of family legacy.
This film still needs color correction.
Crew: Directed by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young, Elaine Rock, Laura Borders-Young, Music by Dayton Mark Borders, Edited by Riley Young, Lex Harold, Produced by Riley Young
A Race Against Life | 2020
A Race Against Life is a paper stop-motion short exploring the lifecycle of a seahorse — from courtship and mating to birth and inevitable decline. The film highlights the species’ distinctive reproductive dynamic, in which the male carries and births the eggs following an intricate mating dance. Told entirely through animation and sound, without narration, the project relies on visual rhythm and movement to communicate each stage of life.
Designed to be accessible to audiences of all ages, the film explores themes of fatherhood, vulnerability, and biological inevitability through handcrafted visual storytelling.
Crew: Directed, written, animated, edited by Riley Young
Screenings: Florana International Film Festival
Lost in Transient Memories | 2020
Lost in Transient Memories offers a visual interpretation of what it feels like to experience Transient Epileptic Amnesia, a rare form of epilepsy that disrupts memory and perception. The film follows Fernando as episodes cause his surroundings to fade, his sense of self to dissolve, and forgotten memories to surface unexpectedly. As reality slowly returns, he struggles to reconstruct where he is and who he is.
Blending visual distortion with personal narration, the film invites audiences into the disorientation of memory loss while raising awareness about a condition that often goes unseen. The project centers empathy, using cinematic language to translate a neurological experience into something felt rather than simply explained.
Crew: Directed and edited by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young, Fernando Espinosa, Starring Fernando, Diego, Valentina, Edited by Riley Young
Screenings:
Florana International Film Festival
A Hazy Shade of Winter | 2021
A Hazy Shade of Winter explores the behind the scenes of what it is like to be a wildlife filmmaker through the eyes of a poetic documentary. This film focuses on the environment as much as it does on the filmmaker’s journey. It explores the brutal conditions that are met to capture the perfect shot. We are shown the blankets of snow and ice, the bundled filmmaker, the clouded skies, and the cold breaths of winter. Shot in negative 20-degree weather, this film aims to show the pure patience that is needed to observe and capture wildlife.
Crew: Directed by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young, Produced by Chrissie Bodznick, Ashley Lobao, Subject Ashley Lobao, Edited by Riley Young, Chrissie Bodznick, Ashley Lobao
A Bannack Nightmare | 2020
Bannack in a ghost town just outside of Dillon, Montana. It holds gruesome history as having the first jail in the country to house murderers as well as having a gallows. A Bannack Nightmare is a poetic look into the now dilapidated town focusing on what lies behind the outward appearance.
Crew: Directed and edited by Riley Young, Hand Performance by Lex Harold
A Walk Through the Garden | 2022
An experimental 16mm study exploring light, texture, and movement within a garden landscape. The film incorporates in-camera double exposures, single-frame manipulation, solarization, and hand-altered negatives to investigate the materiality of film itself.
Through analog experimentation, the project examines how memory and perception can be shaped through process as much as subject.
Crew: Directed by Riley Young, Cinematography by Riley Young
Face: A Work in Progress | 2022
An intimate, reflexive exploration of the aftermath of sexual assault. Using paint applied to a mirror as both medium and metaphor, the film contrasts outward composure with internal fracture. The mirrored surface holds two selves at once — the version presented to the world and the one shaped by memory.
Through visual symbolism and performance, the project examines how trauma alters perception, identity, and the act of looking at oneself. The film remains an ongoing personal work.
Crew: Directed by Riley Young, Written by Riley Young, Performed by Riley Young