Rest Stop
Directed by:
Crystal Kayiza
13 mins
Sunday, Nov 20, 2022
3:00 PM
Shorts Program 4
It’s the early 2000’s and it’s been months since meyi has seen her father and ezeresi has seen her husband.
Meyi is a young Ugandan-American girl, who has yet to see the world beyond her Mother’s arms. An anxious middle child, Meyi often gets lost in the shuffle between first born son, Winston and her younger sister, Baby Charlotte. But Ezeresi pays special attention to her eldest daughter, who only speaks in whispers. She has built a life for her three children, one where she is the all knowing matriarch. This all changes when the family embarks on a bus ride from Albany, New York to Tulsa, Oklahoma to reunite with Christopher, the children’s estranged Father.
STUART Cinema & Café
About the Filmmaker
Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,”
she is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship, Jacob Burns Film Center Woman Filmmaker Fellowship, Points North Institute North Star Fellowship and Sisters in Cinema Documentary Fellowship. Her film, Edgecombe, was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival where it was acquired for distribution by POV. Her most recent non-fiction short, See You Next Time, was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released by the New Yorker. Crystal was the winner of the 2020 Tribeca CHANEL Through Her Lens program grant with her film Rest Stop, which is premiering at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). She received a Heartland Emmy Award in 2012 for her film All That Remains, which profiles Boley, Oklahoma, one of the nation’s last all-black towns. She is currently in pre-production on her first non-fiction feature film, which received the 2021 Creative Capital Award.