CAMP KIDS is a short narrative film about returning to the person you thought you'd lost.

The film is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts organization. Contributions made through our campaign are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law and directly support the production and completion of CAMP KIDS.

Mac is in the middle of a quiet quarter-life crisis, drifting through adulthood without quite knowing what she's looking for. During a late-night, weed-laced drive down familiar country roads, she passes the sleepaway camp that shaped her childhood. The camp has long since closed, but a mysterious woman appears beside the weathered entrance sign, silently beckoning her inside. When Mac stops to investigate, the woman has vanished.

Suddenly, it is daytime.

Drawn into the abandoned camp, Mac wanders through its empty cabins and overgrown paths until she reaches her old bunk. Her childhood name tag looks freshly painted. Beside it is another: Laura. Inside waits the girl she once knew.

As the two spend the day exploring the camp together, Laura becomes both companion and challenge. Where Mac has become guarded, practical, and disconnected from herself, Laura remains playful, fearless, and completely alive. Through games, adventures, and difficult conversations, Laura forces Mac to confront the question she has spent years avoiding:

When their emotional standoff finally breaks into laughter, the impossible happens. The deserted camp suddenly fills with children running, shouting, and playing. Past and present exist together for a fleeting moment, revealing that childhood is never truly gone. It waits just beyond the veil, ready to welcome us back whenever we're willing to return.

CAMP KIDS was inspired by writer-director Lily Yuh Bradfield's own experience returning to the summer camp that defined her childhood after seven years away.

Coming back meant encountering a place that held an earlier version of herself. The cabins, paths, traditions, and memories remained even as she had grown into someone different.

That feeling became the heart of CAMP KIDS.

The film explores nostalgia, identity, and the strange uncertainty of your twenties, when growing up can sometimes feel less like becoming yourself and more like losing pieces of yourself along the way.

At its center is a question: How do we grow up without leaving ourselves behind?

CAMP KIDS isn't interested in returning to childhood literally. It's about remembering the qualities we often abandon as we get older: curiosity, fearlessness, imagination, play, and the freedom to experience something without worrying about what it means for the future.

Through Mac and Laura, we want to create a film that feels like remembering something you aren't entirely sure happened.

 Summer camp is uniquely suited to this story.

For a few weeks every year, camp creates its own little universe. There are rituals, friendships, songs, inside jokes, traditions, and places that can feel enormous when you're a kid. Then summer ends, everyone goes home, and eventually that entire world exists mostly in memory.

We want CAMP KIDS to capture the feeling of returning to one of those places years later and discovering that it is simultaneously smaller than you remember and somehow still full of ghosts.

We're shooting the film on 16mm to give Mac's return to camp a tactile, imperfect quality. Grain, movement, natural light, and texture will help the film live somewhere between memory and the present.

And when the abandoned camp finally comes alive again, we want it to feel less like a supernatural twist than a memory briefly becoming real.

 CAMP KIDS is being made by a team of emerging filmmakers, many of whom grew up going to summer camp themselves and have personal connections to the world of the film.

Lily Yuh Bradfield is based between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, where she grew up. Her work explores girlhood, queerness, identity, female relationships, nostalgia, and the varying definitions of truth. Her most recent short film, WE LIKED YOUR VIBE, won Best LGBTQIA+ Short Film at Lady Filmmakers Festival and Venice Shorts and was an official selection at Atlanta HorrorFest and Cannes World Film Festival. She currently works as support staff in a writers' room on an ongoing Netflix series.

SOPHIA MELONI — EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Sophia Meloni is a New York City-based writer and director taking on producing for CAMP KIDS. Her first short film, CHOP CHEESE, produced by Lisa Rudin, will premiere at Palm Springs International Film Festival. Sophia is also a camp kid herself. She and Lily met at summer camp when they were 12 years old and have been friends ever since.

MICHAEL FIEBIG — PRODUCER
Michael Fiebig is a New York City-based producer, director, and former camp kid who has somehow managed to never stop playing around with cameras. He has produced short films that have screened at festivals including New Directors/New Films and Rockaway Film Festival and is part of the team organizing the Neighborhood Film Festival. He's excited for CAMP KIDS to give him an excuse to go back to camp.

ALIZA BRUGGER — PRODUCER
Aliza Brugger is a Nebraska-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker with an MFA in Film from Columbia University. Their feature AT MOTHER'S KNEE was developed at the Hamptons Screenwriting Lab and Athena Labs and accepted into the Cine Qua Non Script Revision Lab. They are currently directing the feature documentary A LITTLE GAY ON THE PRAIRIE, following queer people building lives in rural USA. Their short films have screened at festivals including Torino, PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights, Outfest, and Female Eye Festival. Their work explores rural identity, queerness, working-class survival, empathy, and connection.

SARAH PENSON — DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Sarah Penson is a New York City-based cinematographer with credits spanning narrative features, short films, music videos, and live performance. Her camera department credits include THE MAN I LOVE, BLUE SUN PALACE, LUCKY LU, Taylor Swift's ALL TOO WELL: THE SHORT FILM, and Chappell Roan's THE SUBWAY. She is currently photographing her first feature as cinematographer and loves working on 16mm film. Sarah is another former camp kid. She and Lily met when they were 12 years old and have reconnected to make CAMP KIDS together.

CARA GRIFFIN — FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Cara Griffin is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who genuinely loves assistant directing. Her recent AD work includes MAIDENHAIR, which screened at New Directors/New Films, Rockaway Film Fest, and New Next Film Fest. She is a recipient of the 2023 NYC Women's Fund finishing grant in partnership with NYFA and MOME for her short film MY SAVIOR. Cara also heads acquisitions at Shorts Movie Theater, the first theater exclusively dedicated to short films, opening in Brooklyn.

LILY ANNINGER — SOUND
Lily Anninger is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker and sound mixer who graduated from Vassar College, where she studied film and music. Drawn to the ways sound can shape a story, her filmmaking explores audio as a central narrative element. She has worked as a sound mixer on numerous short films and recently worked as a utility sound technician on her first feature.

ELLA TALERICO — KEY PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Ella Talerico is a playwright, screenwriter, director, songwriter, designer, and founding member of the production company Tin Can Contingency. She recently completed Studio Theatre's Artistic Producing Fellowship and is the recipient of the Marilyn Swartz Seven Prize in Playwriting and Molly Thatcher Kazan Prize in Theater. Her recent short film credits include WORMBALL, SEMIOTICS OF A FACE, and AMERICAN GIRL.

VI TO — MAC
Vi To is a New York-based actor with a BA with honors in Drama and Political Science from Vassar College.Their training spans acting, movement, playwriting, and experimental theatre, with stage credits including GLORIA, MAD FOREST, METAMORPHOSES, and MOSQUITOES.

LENA — LAURA
Lena is a New York City-based actor and director whose credits include Broadway's THE BALUSTERS, Atlantic Theater Company's CORNELIA STREET, and Peacock's DEVIL IN DISGUISE: JOHN WAYNE GACY. She graduated with honors from Vassar College, holds certificates from LAMDA and the Atlantic Acting School, and is a co-founder of The Writer's Salon and Nocturne Theater. And there are still more CAMP KIDS joining us. We'll continue introducing members of our production design, camera, and production teams as we move toward the shoot.

We've assembled our core cast and crew, begun pre-production, and are preparing to bring CAMP KIDS to life.

Our current budget is approximately $20,000. For an independent narrative film, that's a small budget, and we're stretching every dollar as far as possible. But making a film still means paying the people who make it possible, feeding everyone on set, transporting our team, renting equipment, buying and processing film stock, creating the physical world of the story, and carrying the footage all the way through post-production. That's where you come in.

CAST & CREW 
Our largest priority is the people making the film. Donations help us compensate our actors, camera team, lighting and grip crew, sound department, production designers, assistant director, production assistants, and the other artists and technicians who make CAMP KIDS possible.

SHOOTING ON 16MM
We're shooting CAMP KIDS on 16mm film because its texture and imperfection are integral to the way we want memory to feel in the film. Our budget includes approximately $2,000 for 16mm film stock, in addition to camera equipment and approximately $1,600 to scan the exposed film after production.

PRODUCTION
Getting everyone to camp and keeping a film set running requires a lot of less glamorous but essential things.Your donations help cover transportation, production insurance, meals, craft services, wardrobe, props, production design, camera equipment, lighting and grip equipment, and other day-to-day production expenses.

POST-PRODUCTION
Finishing the shoot is only the beginning. After production, CAMP KIDS will move into editing, sound design and mixing, color, music, and final delivery. We've already budgeted for essential post-production costs, including our film scan and sound work, and additional funds will help us complete the film at the level we're aiming for.

THE UNEXPECTED
We've also built a 10% contingency into our production budget. Independent filmmaking rarely goes exactly according to plan. Weather changes. Equipment breaks. A location suddenly needs something nobody anticipated. Having a contingency means those surprises don't have to come at the expense of our crew, our cast, or the film.

WHAT DOES MY DONATION ACTUALLY DO?

Every contribution matters.

$15 can help provide a meal for someone on set.
$50 can help get a member of our team to location.
$100 can help put more 16mm film through the camera.
$250 can make a meaningful contribution toward paying one of the artists or technicians spending their day bringing the film to life.
And larger donations can transform what's possible for a production of this size.

You don't have to fund the whole movie to make a difference. CAMP KIDS will be built out of hundreds of individual contributions, favors, hours, meals, rides, ideas, and people deciding that they want to help this film exist.

Short films rarely have access to traditional financing. Films like CAMP KIDS exist because communities decide they want them to exist.

Our goal isn't simply to make the film as cheaply as possible. We want to make it responsibly. That means compensating our collaborators whenever possible, feeding people well, creating a safe and supportive set, and giving our team the resources they need to make ambitious work.

CAMP KIDS is ultimately a film about returning to a community that once made you feel completely yourself.

It feels fitting that making the film requires building another one.

Whether you donate $10, come to one of our fundraising events, claim one of our campaign rewards, or simply share CAMP KIDS with someone who might connect with it, you're becoming part of the community bringing this film to life.