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Resonance Films

Resonance Films is a small, disability-centered documentary production company based in Los Angeles, California, founded by Julian Reyes. The company specializes in authentic, emotionally grounded documentaries focused on disability, chronic illness, and underrepresented stories, with an unwavering commitment to honoring its subjects' full humanity rather than reducing them to objects of pity or inspiration.

Overview

Resonance Films operates from the conviction that disabled stories deserve to be told with truth, dignity, and compassion—and that the best person to make those films is someone who has lived inside that experience. Julian Reyes, a disabled filmmaker with focal epilepsy, cyclic vomiting syndrome, chronic migraines, and suspected POTS and autism, built the company from his bedroom in Los Angeles with limited resources and enormous ambition. The company's name reflects the lasting emotional impact Julian intends his work to carry: stories that do not merely exist but reverberate, echo, and linger long after the credits roll.

Within the Faultlines universe, Resonance Films' most significant production is 《我还是我》/ I Am Still Me: A Minjae Lee Story, a feature documentary about pianist Minjae Lee that premiered in 2037 and brought the company to wider public attention. The film's ethical approach to disability representation—centering the subject's consent and collaboration while refusing to sanitize or sentimentalize his experience—established Resonance Films' reputation within disability communities as a rare production company that gets disability right.

Founding and History

Julian Reyes founded Resonance Films out of his bedroom, driven by a dream he had carried since he was six years old: to tell disabled stories the way they deserved to be told. His own lived experience with multiple chronic conditions gave him an intimate understanding of what it meant to have one's story dismissed, sanitized, or ignored. No one else was telling these stories with the honesty and dignity they deserved, so he built something that would.

The company began with a documentary thesis or short film during Julian's time in college—a project that gained traction for its emotional honesty and quiet cinematography before his medical leaves forced him out of academia. That early work became the foundation for Resonance Films, which grew from a one-person operation into a small but fiercely committed team. Kayla Rossi joined as producer and field coordinator, bringing the organizational capacity and interpersonal skill that the company needed to function at a professional level. Together, Julian and Kayla developed the ethical framework and aesthetic approach that would define the company's work, culminating in the 2037 production of I Am Still Me.

Products, Services, and Business Model

Resonance Films produces feature-length and short-form documentaries centered on disabled subjects, prioritizing stories that have been overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream media. The company works at a small scale by design—Julian's health requires it, and the company's ethical framework for subject collaboration is not compatible with high-volume production. Each project is treated as a long-term relationship with its subjects rather than an extraction.

The filmmaking approach prioritizes presence over production value. Julian's camera lingers, listens, and waits. Narration is intimate rather than authoritative. The aesthetic is deliberately unhurried, allowing moments to breathe rather than cutting them for dramatic effect. Films are distributed through a combination of festival circuit premieres, art-house theater runs, and streaming partnerships with public media outlets. The 2037 PBS acquisition of I Am Still Me established a distribution model that Resonance Films seeks to replicate with future productions.

《我还是我》/ I Am Still Me: A Minjae Lee Story

Resonance Films' most notable production to date, this feature-length documentary follows Minjae Lee, a Korean-Chinese pianist living with spastic cerebral palsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, and global developmental delays. The film premiered on March 20, 2037, at an art-house theater in Los Angeles and was picked up by PBS for streaming distribution. It received five stars from Indie Film Weekly and sparked significant conversation within disability communities about authentic representation, the ethics of documentary filmmaking, and the capacity for love and partnership regardless of cognitive ability. When Minjae asked the crew not to edit out his seizures and pain, that request was honored absolutely—not because it made for better cinema, but because it was his story to tell.

Founding Philosophy and Business Identity

Resonance Films operates on a set of principles that reflect Julian's personal ethics and his lived experience as a disabled filmmaker.

The company never makes a film about a disabled person without their full, ongoing consent and ongoing collaboration throughout the production process. Subjects are treated as partners in the storytelling, not as passive objects of the camera's gaze. This principle shapes everything from the initial approach to a subject through editing decisions and public communications about the finished film.

The company refuses to produce inspiration porn, the pervasive documentary tendency to reduce disabled lives to lessons for nondisabled audiences. Every project is evaluated against the question of whether it presents its subject as a complete human being or reduces them to a vehicle for nondisabled emotional catharsis. Kayla Rossi serves as the team's ethical barometer in this regard, ensuring that the public narrative around each project reflects the company's commitments rather than drifting toward the more comfortable and commercially familiar frames the broader documentary market rewards.

Resonance Films understands itself as a disability-led organization in the fullest sense—not merely a company that produces disability content, but one whose operations, aesthetics, and ethics are shaped by the lived experience of its founder and the communities whose stories it tells. Julian's own disabilities are not incidental to what Resonance Films produces; they are its foundation.

Key Relationships and Clients

Resonance Films' most significant external relationship is with the Fifth Bar Collective, CRATB's initiative focused on disability arts and accessibility in the music and creative industries. The Collective features Resonance Films as a frequent collaborator and lists Julian in their directory of partners, a relationship grounded in shared commitment to centering disabled voices in creative work and ensuring that disability representation is led by disabled people themselves.

The relationship with the Minjae Lee family—Joon-Ho Lee, Nari Lee, and Minjae himself—represents the company's most deeply developed subject relationship, one that evolved through the full production of I Am Still Me and continued in the documentary's public reception. The family's trust in Resonance Films, and their active partnership in shaping the film's narrative, became the model against which Julian measures every subsequent subject relationship.

Workplace Culture and Staff

Founders and Senior Leadership

Julian Reyes serves as the company's founder, director, editor, and narrator. His creative vision drives every project, and his editing process is intense and consuming—he hyperfocuses for hours, sometimes forgetting meals or medications, until Kayla intervenes. His narration style is low, intimate, and audibly emotional, positioning him as a witness rather than an authority. Julian's chronic conditions require that production timelines accommodate his health, with shoots and editing sessions built around his body's capacity rather than conventional industry schedules. This is not a constraint the company apologizes for; it is part of how Resonance Films models disabled-led work.

Key Staff

Kayla Rossi serves as producer, field coordinator, and social media and marketing manager. She is the first point of contact for documentary subjects and their families, building the trust that allows filming to proceed. She manages the logistical side of the company—scheduling, finances, emails, press inquiries—tasks that Julian's executive dysfunction makes overwhelming. Her social media presence (@kaylatellsstories) shapes Resonance Films' public image, and her fierce advocacy ensures that every public-facing communication reflects the company's ethical commitments. Kayla's role is not support staff in the conventional sense; she is a creative and ethical co-architect of what Resonance Films produces and how it presents itself to the world.

Public Reputation and Industry Standing

Resonance Films' reputation rests on the emotional authenticity and ethical rigor of its work. Within disability communities, the company is regarded as a rare example of filmmaking that gets disability right—that shows the mess and the beauty without flinching from either, without reducing either to a lesson for nondisabled viewers. Julian's own disabilities lend credibility that nondisabled filmmakers struggle to achieve, and the company's commitment to subject collaboration rather than extraction has earned trust from families and communities that mainstream documentary production has historically exploited.

The release of I Am Still Me brought Resonance Films to wider public attention, drawing both acclaim and criticism. The acclaim centered on the documentary's refusal to sanitize or sentimentalize disability. The criticism, primarily from a DocuWatch review, questioned whether the inclusion of raw footage of Minjae's pain constituted exploitation—a charge that was forcefully rebutted by disabled viewers, disability advocates, and the Lee family themselves.

Financial History and Business Challenges

Resonance Films operates at a small scale, with the financial profile of an independent documentary production company rather than a studio or production house. Revenue comes from distribution deals, streaming rights, and festival acquisitions rather than volume production. The 2037 PBS partnership for I Am Still Me represented the company's most significant commercial achievement to date, providing distribution reach that independent art-house release alone could not have produced.

The primary financial challenge for Resonance Films is not market viability but production capacity. Julian's health means that production timelines are longer and less predictable than conventional documentary schedules, limiting how many projects the company can pursue simultaneously. Kayla's management of the company's operational functions is financially essential as well as ethically important—without that support structure, Julian's executive dysfunction and chronic fatigue would make sustained production impossible. The company's small size is simultaneously its philosophical commitment and its financial constraint.

Character-Specific Connections

Julian Reyes

Resonance Films is the direct expression of Julian's lifelong desire to tell disabled stories with truth and dignity. His founding of the company was not a career move so much as a conviction that the stories he needed to tell existed nowhere else and would have to be made. The company's identity is inseparable from his—its aesthetic, ethics, operational structure, and scale all reflect his creative vision and health realities. For Julian, Resonance Films is not just where he works; it is the form his life has taken.

Kayla Rossi

Kayla's relationship to Resonance Films is that of co-creator, even if the title structure lists her as producer rather than founder. She shapes what the company presents to the world, builds the trust relationships that make filming possible, and serves as Julian's ethical check and logistical anchor. The company as it actually functions—as a working, public-facing entity—is as much her creation as his.

Minjae Lee

Minjae is Resonance Films' most significant subject and the person whose story gave the company its defining public presence. His collaboration with Julian and Kayla during the production of I Am Still Me was not a passive agreement to be filmed but an active partnership in how his story was told. His request that his seizures and pain not be edited out—honored completely—shaped the film's most important ethical decision and became the clearest illustration of what the company's commitment to subject collaboration actually means in practice.

Disability, Accessibility, and Inclusion

As a company founded by a disabled filmmaker, Resonance Films builds accessibility into its operations from the ground up. Production schedules accommodate Julian's health, with shoots planned around his capacity and built-in flexibility for days when his conditions flare. The company's editing workflow accounts for his photosensitivity, with filtered footage and adjusted monitor settings. Kayla manages the logistical demands that Julian's executive dysfunction and chronic fatigue make difficult, creating a working partnership that models how disabled-led organizations can thrive when supported by people who understand rather than accommodate reluctantly.

The company's documentary practice is itself a form of disability justice work: centering the consent and collaboration of disabled subjects, refusing to frame disability as tragedy or inspiration, and insisting that disabled lives deserve the full complexity of honest storytelling rather than the flattening that mainstream representation so often provides.

Legacy and Impact

Resonance Films' legacy, as of 2037, is still being built. The company has produced one major documentary, established a reputation for ethical rigor and emotional authenticity within disability communities, and demonstrated that disabled-led filmmaking can reach mainstream distribution channels without compromising its founding commitments. I Am Still Me established that there is an audience for disability representation that refuses to sanitize or sentimentalize—that people, disabled and nondisabled alike, respond to truth.

What Resonance Films represents within the Faultlines universe extends beyond its individual productions. It is evidence that disabled artists can build viable creative enterprises without abandoning the values that drove them to create in the first place, and that the disability community will support work that gets them right.

Organizations Businesses Production Companies Disability Arts Los Angeles Resonance Films