Ken Breniman

After a near-death experience, a queer death doula travels to Borneo to commune with orangutans, bringing singing bowls and a book as offerings. Told through handcrafted stop-motion, this under-nine-minute film asks whether our endangered forest cousins may have something urgent to teach humanity about grief, privilege, empathy, and surviving the Anthropocene.

The film is for children of all ages, environmentally conscious, LGBTQ+ and socially engaged audiences, animal lovers, educators, grief and end-of-life communities, and viewers drawn to unconventional documentary storytelling. Its spirit sits somewhere between My Octopus Teacher, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and the philosophical playfulness of Everything Everywhere All at Once: intimate, unusual, heartfelt, and much larger than its running time.

The project grew out of a near-death experience, the legacy of Dr. Jane Goodall, and an increasing sense of planetary grief. At a moment of extinction, climate disruption, political division, and technological obsession, the film asks a deliberately provocative question: why are we waiting for aliens, apocalypse, or some future intelligence to teach us how to evolve when our wise forest cousins are already here?

At its heart, Primates, Privilege & Possibility is about making the unconscious conscious. It asks us to examine not only the privileges we possess, but the ones we assume others possess, and to consider how greater self-awareness might move us from domination toward relationship, responsibility, and care.

The stop-motion short is fully completed and entering the festival circuit. Our next goal is to raise $25,000 to finish a companion 20-minute live-action documentary that tells the same story on a larger human canvas. If A24 or another distribution company wants to work with us, we are very open to this.

The live-action film brings in community members, artists, musicians, and public figures to explore what privilege means in their own lives—where it is visible, where it is hidden, and what responsibility might come with recognizing it.

Together, the two films form one larger call to action: to become more self-aware rather than self-absorbed, to turn privilege into purposeful action, and to ask what kind of great ape humanity still has the possibility of becoming.