 The Bell Affair is about freedom making. It is about the art and desire for freedom. It tells the story of Daniel and Mary Bell and how they exhausted their every means for freedom through the courts. I am the director on the film and the co-writer and also narrate the film. So I did all the research to look into the Bell family and their freedom suits that they filed in the D.C. courts. While Kiedel and I collaborated extensively on the script and the screenplay, I did a lot of the court scenes in the film and so we really shared that work but it was collaborative through and through. Well as the producer I manage all of the talent and all of the staff. I'm also the art director of the film so I handle the aesthetic of the film and the general animations. We received our grant in 2019 and we were scheduled to have a studio shoot in June 2020. So when the pandemic hit we had no plan for how to have 40 actors and actresses participate in this film. So we rebooted the whole film. We reorganized the entire pipeline with our production team so that we could ship costumes to actors who filmed by themselves in their homes with instructions on how to do every single shot. It was a most wonderfully challenging role to have in this film especially given that I was directing people via Zoom the entire time. Well I think the impact has been enormous. We had a premiere in Washington D.C. and descendants of the Bell family, more than 25 descendants came from all over the United States to the premiere. This history has really brought the family together that had been separated after the sale of the children of Daniel and Mary Bell in 1848. So two parts of the family that had been separated for generations really came together meeting for the first time. We're showing that enslaved people use the court system to gain their freedom and we're also showing that there were white lawyers who were representing them. So these are the kinds of instances, the kinds of events that we are informing the nation about. Well New Tech's been essential because without New Tech we couldn't think about, we couldn't really see a way to distribute this film more broadly. What we want to do is get this film out into the world and New Tech is helping us do that. I also want to thank the University of Nebraska. The University has been behind our work and supportive of our work from the moment we thought about collaborating. But we can't do this work without the support of the University, all the talent here and the moral and financial support. So it's really important to me that we have that and I'm really thankful for it.