Jesse

Honored to have accepted the Visionary Director and Best First Feature awards at the @pafilmfestival on behalf of all of the amazing artists who worked on @piggyduster And I promise I looked less goofy before security showed up. And I ran out of white socks, sue me. And yes the AiA posts are coming, give me five seconds. Geez. What is this, 20 Questions?

👀 Teaser Trailer drops tomorrow! #teaser #newmovie #comingsoon

👀 Brian Landis Folkins, everybody piggyduster.com #movie #teaser #comingsoon

The festival tour comes to an end! 🏝️ Piggy Duster just returned from a magical International Premiere at @pafilmfestival with three wins, including Visionary Director for @jse.exe , Best First Feature, and Gary Fieldman was recognized for his exceptional executive producer talents. 🍊 @orlandofilmfest was postponed to Winter 2026, but Piggy Duster has been nominated for Best Feature Film! More details soon! 🏛️ We owe festival director Jaina Cipriano of @arlingtonfilmfest some real special thanks for putting on a wonderful event in the greater Boston area, producer @mj_alhabeeb_jr ‘s old stomping grounds. 🤠 The people of Amarillo spoke and @amarillofilmfestival gave Piggy Duster the Audience Choice Award! ⛴️ The audiences and staff of @ptfilmfest , one of the best experiences a filmmaker can have, welcomed us and Piggy Duster so warmly, we were just as moved to tears by their hospitality as they were by the film. Truly Sundance by the Sea. 🌉 The Pittsburgh Independent Film Festival was intimate in all the ways we hoped, the selected films were exceptional, and connections were made that’ll last a lifetime. 🌽 @julienfilmfest in Iowa surprised everyone! Producer @alex_on_vhs met three half-siblings he didn’t know he had until just a couple months prior, sharing the unconventional definitions of family in Piggy Duster with one another; marveling at the ways that art imitates life and deepening the meaning of family just as the film does. 🗽@sohofilmfest was a dream for the World Premiere, without a dry eye in the house, followed by a Q&A with @juliama and @juliette.leong . Producer @evansiamdb was also awarded most stylish dresser by the cast and crew). Piggy Duster now turns to the next chapter, and we can’t wait to share a peek 😘

Adventures in Architecture XVIII: Chichen Itza You need to care about things that are weird. You should have a list of things that don’t really make sense for you to be drawn toward. Things that make you say, “I’m just a secretary in 1990s Tokyo, but for some reason I really care about the history of fashion in Madagascar.” A lot of these ‘eccentric’ passions get washed away as we get older. You’re still yourself, but those particularities just never find a place in conversation. How many dates do you go on before telling your partner that, even though you’re a small-town steel worker, there’s something about calligraphy and stationery that excites you? I like Chichen Itza. A lot. For no reason. I have both Panamanian and Iberian heritage, so you’d think it’d be because of some “inherent unresolved Mesoamerican urge to understand myself better,” but no. In the same way I doodled skyscrapers in New York as a child, I drew Chichen Itza because it’s just horizontal rectangles with green trees around them. I like the quiet spite of something beautiful in a place of chaos. So, in my thirties, when I walked toward the old Mayan city and those rectangles peeked over the foliage…I got chills on behalf of my childhood self. An irrational dream fulfilled. Chichen Itza, in its best state, has been sitting in the jungle since about 900 AD. It was there in 1990. It’ll be there in 2990. Because the Mayans had the foresight to build their irrational interests out of stone. The Temple of Kukulcan has four faces, each with 91 steps—364 total, with the top as the 365th. It’s angled to align with astronomical events like solstices and seasonal star patterns. El Caracol, the observatory, tracked the cycles of Venus—a thousand years ago—using a dome and spiral staircase to study a faint red speck in the sky. Those are objectively unnecessary. Choices that didn’t serve survival in a limestone jungle. But eons after the builders, architects, and artists were gone, we still travel there by the millions to marvel at their brilliance. Hold on to your irrationalities, stack them higher than the tree tops. Without them, you’re just everyone else.

Adventures in Architecture XVII: Puerto Aventuras In ancient Rome, the elite would wear clothing dyed in ‘Tyrian purple.’ Tyre was an old Phoenician harbor (in modern-day Lebanon) that eventually became a Roman colony. They were famous for a shade of purple dye, produced through the mucus of snails native to their sea. Clothing with this color was high-prized because it wouldn’t fade and it was very difficult to make, so wearing anything in Tyrian purple became a status symbol. The mucus could be pulled and harvested from the sea snails, but this was time/labor-intensive. So the Romans would just crush them. Ten thousand snails would be crushed to produce a gram of Tyrian purple. It took a quarter of a million crushed snails to produce enough dye for a toga. They weren’t the first to do it, but the Romans crushed multitudes in a city over a thousand miles away, with the only purpose being to cultivate an air of vanity through an entirely artificial divide within the upper class. ...sorry, blacked out for a second, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Puerto Aventuras is a place I’ve been, they got buildings there 🌊(shout out to both Sandras)

It’s with heavy hearts that we announce that the body of Jesse Stewart (33) was found in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico. He’s alive, it’s an alive body, it’s just sad he’s gone. Not ‘gone’ gone, just not ‘here’ here. Jesse’s en route to Mexico to celebrate cinema and the international premiere of Piggy Duster, and the end of the film festival tour, at the @pafilmfestival . You can probably guess what chapter comes next for the film, but stay tuned!

My feature @piggyduster which I produced alongside @alex_on_vhs @evansiamdb & @jse.exe who also wrote/directed had one heck of a year! Selected to @julienfilmfest “Pittsburgh Independent” @ptfilmfest winning the Audience Choice 🏆 from @amarillofilmfestival a Best Feature Film Nomination from @orlandofilmfest capping it all off with a Best Feature Film Win 🏆 from @pafilmfestival was truly an honor and a blessing in the making. So many talented collaborators on this film and I can’t wait for you all to see it soon 🙏🏽 2026… Here… We.. GO! #newfilm #filmmaker #cinema

Adventures in Architecture XVI: Amarillo When people visualize a city they usually imagine the skyline, the silhouette of the buildings against the horizon. Literally shapes cut from the sky. I like buildings and I like the people inside of them, but sometimes I think big ol’ buildings tear something out of the cosmos and don’t have the decency to replace it with something as reverent. Sometimes we live in the shadows of scars (whoa dude, deep). Amarillo has one building. The FirstBank Southwest Tower. 314 feet. 31 floors. Amarillo doesn’t have landmarks. The indigenous Antelope Creek people barely lived here. It only exists because of a railroad. I could write a piece about literally any settlement in the world, I can defend anyone’s choice to live anywhere, but that doesn’t change the fact that Amarillo is another example of my least favorite thing in the entire universe: post-Industrial-Revolution-hogwash. Sounds pretentious now, sure, but we are massively overdue for a solar storm and when power+utilities get knocked out in geographic areas that couldn’t naturally sustain of population of ANY size, then I’ll send a passenger pigeon to you with a bottled water and a beautifully laminated illustration of my butt so that you can kiss it. But you know what Amarillo does have that most other places don’t? The decency and respect to get out of the way and let their natural surroundings shine. No skyline=no holes in the sky. No holes in the sky=a big canvas for sunrises and sunsets to paint with all the more nuanced colors that they usually can’t afford. Lots of hills and flats for all that light to spill on to. Amarillo is Spanish for ‘yellow’ and boy howdy is it. There’s a lot of ‘fly-over’ states. There’s a lot of “Why would anyone ever live here?” cities and towns. But there’s no such thing as rhythm without a break, and I’ve yet to hear a melody that didn’t benefit from a rest. Sometimes it’s okay to have a silent auditorium that lets your eyes and ears wander. There’s always architecture in the spaces that aren’t filled. Amarillo doesn’t have much and doesn’t have much to do, it just ‘is’ and sometimes just ‘being’ is more than enough.

Adventures in Architecture XV: Port Townsend In another world, Port Townsend could have been the NYC of the West Coast. The ‘City of Dreams’ was founded at the top of the Olympic Peninsula and was a bustling harbor for decades, leading most people to believe that it’d be a huge center of trade, commerce, and culture. So they built really fancy Victorian buildings and lots of nice infrastructure. In the later 1800s the railroad companies stopped building westward, ending at Seattle and Tacoma. No railroad, no future. Fun thing is: if there’s no new industries and population to necessitate renovations, demolition, and rebuilding, then you get to keep all of your fancy Victorian buildings. And if the Olympic Mountains block the precipitation from the Pacific Ocean and send it down to Seattle, then you get a sunny and reasonable climate to preserve all those fancy buildings. Fancy fancy fancy. It’s a quiet, storybook town at the edge of the world. Fog, sunshine, windy roads, straight roads, old buildings, new buildings, orcas, otters, lagoons, beaches, birds, trees, mountains, ocean. Even the ‘suburbs’ are pretty gorgeous. It’s an older, calmer, more creative town than most. All the ‘normal’ townsfolk lived up on the bluff and all the ‘ruffian’ sailors lived down by the shore, so all the roads and buildings bear traces of Port Townsend’s dual nature. Calm but creative. Peaceful but proactive. I’m a big fan of big metropolitan areas. I like kinetics. I like trams and trollies and lightrails, buses, subways, boulevards, avenues, and highways. But I REALLY like areas that don’t need them. There’s a place in every tracklist for triumphant showtunes and blistering guitar solos, but sometimes you just need a simple little sea shanty about how pretty the light of sunset looks reflecting off of the neighboring islands’ chalky white escarps*. (*sometimes I know words, thanks for tuning in)