Reimagining Story

Windmill Films is the production company of filmmakers Rashaad Newsome and Johnny Symons. Working across documentary, narrative cinema, animation, performance, and emerging technology, Windmill creates formally adventurous films rooted in Black and queer experience while reaching toward larger questions of identity, power, intimacy, and the worlds we might build together. The company’s name is a playful reference to “windmilling”—a formidable, if somewhat chaotic, fighting tactic in which someone charges forward while swinging their arms in wide circles. For us, it became a metaphor for filmmaking itself: meeting obstacles with momentum, ingenuity, humor, and persistence, and finding a way through the barriers that too often stand between underrepresented stories and the screen. We windmill our way through.

Newsome and Symons bring more than three decades of combined filmmaking and storytelling experience, with recognition including Academy Award and Emmy nominations, a Sundance Grand Jury Prize, a Creative Capital Award, and a Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica. Their first feature collaboration, Assembly, premiered at SXSW in 2025 and has since screened at more than 60 festivals internationally, including BFI Flare, Hot Docs, Frameline, Sydney Film Festival, and Vancouver International Film Festival, earning multiple awards before its 2026 broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens. Moving between documentary, performance, animation, and the presence of an artificial-intelligence character, the film reflects Windmill’s larger approach: using cinema not simply to represent existing realities, but to imagine new ones.

Windmill is currently developing a slate of projects that continues this experimentation across narrative film, documentary, speculative fiction, visual effects, and new forms of cinematic storytelling.

Rashaad Newsome is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, director, and technological innovator whose practice moves fluidly between cinema, performance, animation, visual effects, artificial intelligence, music, and community-based work.

Across his films and interdisciplinary projects, Newsome uses collage as both a visual language and a way of thinking—breaking apart dominant cultural forms and recomposing them through Black and queer histories, aesthetics, and ways of knowing. His work frequently brings emerging technologies into conversation with embodied knowledge, asking who technologies are built for, whose intelligence they recognize, and how they might be used to imagine more expansive futures.

Newsome co-directed the feature documentary Assembly with Johnny Symons. He has also created more than fifteen short films and moving-image works that have screened at festivals, museums, arts institutions, and on PBS.

His work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Centre Pompidou, the Hayward Gallery, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Park Avenue Armory, and SFMOMA, among many others. Recent honors include a 2025 Creative Capital Award, a 2025 United States Artists Fellowship, the NEWFEST Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award, and the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.

Newsome holds an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Connecticut.

Johnny Symons is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose work has helped shape contemporary LGBTQ+ documentary cinema. Over the course of his career, he has directed and produced award-winning films exploring family, identity, politics, faith, and social change.

His feature documentary Daddy & Papa premiered at Sundance, was broadcast in more than a dozen countries, and received twelve festival awards. Out Run premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and aired on public television, while Ask Not broadcast nationally on PBS and screened at the U.S. Capitol.

Symons was a co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated Long Night’s Journey Into Day, winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and an executive producer of Pray Away, which premiered at Tribeca and was released globally by Netflix. Most recently, he co-directed Assembly with Rashaad Newsome.

His films have screened at more than 300 international film festivals and have received support from organizations including the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute, ITVS, Catapult Film Fund, HBO, Frameline, and the California Council for the Humanities.

Symons is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a former Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program fellow, and a former co-chair of New Day Films. He graduated with honors from Brown University, earned an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, and is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.