SKIP, 17, lives in the suffocating grip of respectability — curlers, frilly dresses, and a mother who sees the world in scripture. When Elsie, the pastor’s luminous wife, drops by with a strawberry pie and an inexplicable wink, something in Skip ignites that she doesn’t yet have words for.
She follows Elsie’s car down the back roads and arrives at Ms. Ruby’s — a juke joint operating in plain sight and secret shadow, a sanctuary for Black queer life in an America that refuses to acknowledge its existence. Inside, Skip encounters a world of drag queens and dancers, gamblers and poets, the fearless Wooty slicking her waves in a bathroom mirror, and the magnetic Ms. Darling commanding the room with a capella blues.
When police lights wash red and blue through the windows, the party freezes. Ms. Darling breaks the silence — not with fear, but song. And Skip, coaxed to the front, finds her own voice in the crowd.
JUK is a period short film set in 1950s Georgia, centered on Skip — a 17-year-old Black girl navigating her emerging queer identity against the backdrop of the Black juke joint tradition. The juke joint was one of the first free cultural spaces created by African American freedmen — a place where the sacred and secular met, where music, dancing, and love existed outside the rules of the dominant culture.
The film blends rich period atmosphere with a deeply contemporary emotional truth: the cost of hiding who you are, and the grace found when you stop.
A Chapman University MFA Graduate Thesis Film (FP-698), JUK was produced under the SAG-AFTRA Student Film Agreement by Son of a Botanist Productions LLC in association with C8LDEARTH ENT.
Tierra “TT” Frost is a writer and director from Seattle, Washington. A Black queer female artist and former ninth grade history teacher in Oakland, California, her work is rooted in an understanding of storytelling as a tool for connection, empathy, and healing. Drawing from her intersecting identities, she creates emotionally resonant, culturally impactful work that explores the complexity of the human experience — centering queer stories of color and the varied ways women express gender and identity, grounded in emotional precision and character-driven storytelling.
Her short film Pink Oz. (2025) was selected for the Seattle Black Film Festival and TAG! Queer Shorts Film Festival (both 2026). She served as Creative Director on DDG’s Storyteller music video (3.2M+ YouTube views) and as Creative Director for Whiipped, a sold-out queer theatrical experience for predominantly Black and Brown queer audiences in major U.S. cities.
A GLAAD 2025 Black Queer Creative Cohort member and 2025 Summer TV Development intern at JuVee Productions (Viola Davis and Julius Tennon), she currently interns with MACRO and the BlackStar Film Festival. JUK is her MFA thesis film.
Long before language existed for what I am — Black, queer, from Seattle, from a lineage of people who survived by finding each other in the margins — there were juke joints. These weren’t just gathering places. They were permission. Permission to move your body the way your body wanted to move. Permission to be seen by people who looked like you and loved like you. Permission to exist loudly in a world that preferred you quiet.
My protagonist lives in a moment when none of that permission is supposed to exist for her. It’s the 1950s. The rules are clear. And she finds her way to Ruby’s House anyway.
I came to this story because I needed it. Growing up, I rarely saw young Black queer girls on screen who weren’t defined by their pain. I wanted to make something that starts with joy — the specific, almost unbearable joy of discovering that the thing you thought made you strange is actually the thing that makes you electric. The juke joint gave me a container for that. Music, movement, community, risk. Everything that matters.
JUK is for the kid who found her people in the wrong century. And for the ones who are still looking.
— Tierra “TT” Frost, Writer & Director
Marc Sternberg is a Creative Producer, documentary filmmaker, and Fulbright Specialist (2024–2027) whose work is dedicated to amplifying voices that have been historically excluded from the screen. He is the founder of Son of a Botanist Productions (Orange, CA) and the creator of a growing slate of documentaries, docuseries, and narrative projects centered on underrepresented communities across the American West and beyond.
His fifth feature documentary, Cowgirls: Women of Western Art, explores gender and recognition in fine art collecting culture, narrated by Red Steagall and submitted to Tribeca’s Work-in-Progress track. His prestige docuseries Outside the Frame — in development with Paradigm attached — chronicles Black Western American artists whose contributions have been systematically erased from the historical record.
Sternberg holds an MFA from Chapman University’s Dodge College, a Graduate Diploma in Screenwriting from Oxford, and an MBA from the University of Arizona. He is currently completing an MSc in Change Leadership from Oxford/HEC Paris — where he received the Director’s Award for academic excellence — and a Graduate Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Oxford. He is a Fulbright Specialist in media production and founder of TruthB!rds Inc., accepted into the NVIDIA Inception Program.
| Project | Role | Type | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| JUK | Producer | Short Film | 2026 |
| Cowgirls: Women of Western Art | Writer / Director / Producer | Feature Documentary | 2025 |
| Outside the Frame | Creator / Producer | Docuseries | In Development |
| I Can See the Light | Producer | Short Film | 2024 |
| The WL Story | Producer | Short Film | 2025 |
JUK is a queer coming-of-age story about a young Black woman in the rural South who sneaks out of her strict home to attend a juke joint for the first time. It is a film about the first night you choose yourself.
Writer-director Tierra “TT” Frost — a former intern at JuVee Productions (Viola Davis and Julius Tennon) and Chapman University MFA candidate — brings authentic authorship to a story that sits at the intersection of queerness, Blackness, gender, and the American South. My role as producer is to build the infrastructure that gets that voice to the widest possible audience.
The marketing strategy centers a Student Academy Award campaign already underway, followed by premiere festival submissions to Sundance, Slamdance, Tribeca, and SXSW 2027. The film’s rural Southern setting and juke joint culture give it a visual and cultural specificity that distinguishes it within the queer coming-of-age canon.
— Marc Sternberg, Producer
Alia Ali as Hattie Mae · Jazz-Patrick V. Bordeaux as Roz · Michael Houston as Drunk Man
Original score and songs composed by Octaviano Rogés. Additional period music licensed through Universal Production Music.
Octaviano Rogés
Octaviano Rogés is the composer, music supervisor, and featured performer for JUK. His original score weaves blues, gospel, and jazz into an authentic 1950s sonic world while anchoring the film’s emotional arc through Skip’s journey. He also performs the featured original song Freedom Got Away in the film.
Principal photography is complete and JUK is in post-production. We are seeking $9,000 in finishing funds to complete picture lock, sound mix, color grade, and DCP delivery for festival submission.
$8,908 remaining to complete post-production, sound mix, color grade, and DCP delivery for festival submission.
To discuss partnership opportunities, contact Marc Sternberg · Public contributions via GoFundMe
