A road trip mixtape from the one that got away: an exuberant tribute to femmeship, staying punk in middle age, and lovesick ambiguous gay adventures with your long lost ex. I Came Back To Life entered production in December 2025.
Team
AMINA SHAREEF ALI (writer/director/lead actor) is a SWANA- Pilipinx trans femme artist, writer and performer living in Oakland, California. Amina has been playing music for over 25 years, and has written over 125 songs, released six albums and toured nationally. Her music has been profiled on KQED and her writing has appeared in Autostraddle and SF Weekly. She has illustrated a tarot deck and produced her own original stage plays. Amina works as a psychotherapist in the Bay Area queer and trans community. Her first short film Slow Cooker was an official selection for the Alameda Free Library 2025 Trans Film Mini-Fest.
HILDA SCHMELLING (co-director) is an Oakland-based writer/director, musician, actor, plant dad, and witch. As a radical, queer, anti-racist artist they care deeply about collaborative process, collective liberation, and artistic revolution across a cosmos of mutating forms and timelines. Their short film Be Right Back focused on the erotic and comedic potential in femme labor as a shopkeeper blurs the understanding of customer satisfaction. It screened at over twenty festivals domestically and abroad. Hilda had their acting debut in the acclaimed narrative feature film Fremont which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The film lyrically examines identity, longing, and love in diasporic Afghan communities. Coming from a working class background Hilda understands the toll of delayed dreams. Their work is defined by a focus on the fantasies that keep us alive, infusing minds with protective layers of joy and hope for the future that we build together.
STEFANO GONZALEZ (producer) is an award-winning, trans Latinx director/producer. His short script, How To Kill Someone You Hate, won Best Short Film and Best Directing awards at the 2014 Epidemic Film Festival. Do They Fit?, a coproduced short film, was an official selection of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Stefano’s resume includes work on Outerlands (2025 – SXSW Official Selection), Insecure (Season 5) and Matrix Resurrections. In 2020 he served as a juror for the renowned Frameline Completion Fund. In 2017, Stefano founded Transgress Studios, through which he produced the feature film TRANSFINITE, a ground-breaking, sci-fi featuring an ensemble of trans and queer actors of color which played over 20 film festivals worldwide and is currently available for streaming on Amazon and other major platforms.
RICKY MARLER (director of photography) is a cinematographer operating out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work consists of music videos for California artists such as Beast Nest, Joy Ride, and The Bedroom Witch, as well as international doom metal sensation, Divide and Dissolve. She’s also made waves in the trans horror community working with director Sepi Mashiahof on her short films Smooth and the upcoming Humans are Shapes.
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I Came Back To Life 