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The Birthday Song's Fundraiser
Mission Statement
Rather than focusing on Katrina’s aftermath, this film tenderly portrays the human stories behind climate displacement in a way statistics never could. On the 20th anniversary of Katrina, we’re making this film as a powerful act of narrative repair—honoring memory, family, and Black Southern life.
The Birthday Song follows Micah on her 13th birthday—the day she learns a Category 5 hurricane is set to make landfall in her city in less than 48 hours. In the midst of a lively Black family birthday gathering, as Micah wrestles with her own set of adolescent issues, a storm brews in the gulf. Unbeknownst to her, this storm will shape American history—and change the course of her entire life. While The Birthday Song is a narrative film, its story is rooted in true events reconstructed from personal memory, and the film itself incorporates archival elements from 2005.
Megan ‘Megz’ Trufant Tillman on her 13th birthday in New Orleans, August 26, 2005.
The Birthday Song lends a specific voice to a story the world knows, portraying Katrina through an intimate lens—through the eyes of a young Black girl who never made the headlines. While most Katrina stories focus on the aftermath, The Birthday Song tells the story of the-calm-before-the-storm. Capturing the ordinariness of New Orleanians’ lives before Katrina—what it felt like the day before, when everything felt normal—until it didn’t.
The film carefully rebuilds from memory—using photos from personal archives as inspiration—the New Orleans-circa-2005 world that Micah and her family inhabit—its textures, specificity, and style. Before Katrina...
The tone of this film is intimate, slow burn, fly-on-the-wall. The camera is an observer, a witness to life—closely studying people and place, with a patient gaze that slowly reveals our characters’ interiority. With a lush, rich, tender cinematic palette, The Birthday Song shows the beauty of Micah’s world—while also emphasizing all that she stands to lose in the midst of this transition.
Audio pulled from archival news clips functions as an immersive tool, building tension and dropping the audience into the urgency of the evacuation period, while camcorder home video POV references the act of personal archiving and reflects its central paradox—immortalizing memories, while simultaneously emphasizing their impermanence.
Music is a signature element of our storytelling. The Birthday Song will feature an original score conceptualized and composed by Megan Trufant Tillman, whose twin roles as musician and filmmaker are always working in concert (Tillman also composed original scores for our previous two films, little trumpet and Newbies). The intentional musical soundscape will reinforce the film's rhythmic and poetic voice, building a sonic language that shapes how the viewer feels for and connects to our characters, their worlds, and their emotional arcs. While our scores and original music always evolve throughout the process, we always start with a vibe—and we let that inspiration take us to new and imaginative sonic worlds. Check out a sneak peek of our inspo playlist here.
Megan Trufant Tillman + Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence are an award-winning filmmaking duo hailing from New Orleans and Honolulu known as FLYPAPER. Their distinctive voice draws on their backgrounds in music and theater to compose tender cinematic portraits that explore the vast inner worlds of subjects who are rarely seen on screen. Their films are distinguished by lyrical visual language, intimate character portraiture, and original scores conceptualized and composed by Tillman. Their film Newbies premiered at SXSW 2025, where it received the Texas Short Competition Special Jury Award. Their film little trumpet (2022) received multiple jury awards, including Best Louisiana Short at the New Orleans Film Festival. Their next film, The Birthday Song, was selected as the winning project at the 2024 Indie Memphis Black Creators Forum Pitch Rally and the 2024 New Orleans Film Festival's South Pitch competition.
We're shooting The Birthday Song in early October on location in New Orleans. Now through the end of September, we’ll be casting, bringing on board department heads and crew (prioritizing BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ talent), location scouting, continuing archival research, building our visual language and shot list, and securing production equipment. In October, we’ll move into prep and principal photography—a 4-day shoot in New Orleans. Throughout the rest of 2025, we’ll be in post-production (editing, color correction, original score recording, and sound design), putting us on track for a 2026 release. Once the film is completed, we'll submit it to film festivals and host film screenings where you, our audience and supporters, can view the finished film!
Directors Megz + Kimiko and DP Ray Huang on the set of their film Newbies.
Your donations, whether big or small, empower us to make this film—and help us get this powerful story on screen!
All images and collage images were sourced from personal archives, family and friends, Sthaddeus "Polo Silk" Terrell, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue Fan Blog, and ShotDeck. Photo of FLYPAPER by Justin D. Heron.