ITVS Greenlights Second Season of FUTURESTATES!

This spring, ITVS launched the first season of its innovative new web series of futuristic shorts, FUTURESTATES. And as the first season continues to screen online at futurestates.tv, pbs.org, as well as at film festivals around the world, ITVS is proud to announce that we just greenlit a second season of FUTURESTATES shorts written and directed by another batch of talented emerging and veteran filmmakers. The second season is entering production this summer, and is planned to launch online this spring. Stay tuned to futurestates.tv for updates on the run-up to the second season, but in the meantime, we're excited to announce the greenlit filmmakers and their projects!

ASPARAGUS by Robby Henson In a regimented near future, an agricultural engineer learns a lesson about life and love from a renegade asparagus. 

THE DIG by Bennett Cohen An archaeological dig trying to uncover why an ancient civilization fell in an environmental disaster leads to the unexpected discovery of faith. 

DIGITAL ANTIQUITIES by JP Chan Decades from now, a woman in an antique electronics shop is visited by a desperate young man seeking to recover data from an old floppy disk.  In recovering the data, the woman unearths a secret that unites them both. 

EXPOSURE by Mia Trachinger In a world where government agents are employed as live body contagions to immunize urban populations, an unvaccinated man resists being inoculated, and in doing so, learns that the danger of his fears may surpass that of the disease. 

THE SPRING OF SORROW by Suzi Yoonessi and Jonako Donley In this environmentally barren and hardscrabble future, teenage Isabelle desperately offers hope to her eight-year-old sister Lily, by telling a fairy tale allegorically explaining how this tragic world came to be and its  possible salvation by finding the “spring of sorrow.” 

EMIGRATION by Barry Jenkins In this economically polarized future, a disenfranchised family is brought back to San Francisco in an effort to replenish the working class. 

THAT WHICH ONCE WAS by Kimi Takesue In 2050, a twelve-year old boy from the Caribbean, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an “environmental refugee” in a hostile Northern metropolis. When he forges an unlikely friendship with a similarly displaced ice-carver, the boy learns the value of memory. 

BEHOLDER by Nisha Ganatra In this future, conservative parents now genetically modify their children while they are in vitro, and with the discovery of the “Gay Gene,” selecting against homosexuality has become the popular norm. Here, we find Sasha, an expecting mother who discovers her unborn child has tested positive for the “Gay Gene.” She and her husband conflict over the fate of their child, and their future together. 

WHITE by A. Sayeeda Clarke Global warming has accelerated and the sun has become a tangible threat to survival.  Here, we find Bato, an expecting father, who must sacrifice his pride and his racial identity as he is forced to sell the new currency of this world. 

WORKER DRONE by Sharat Raju In the global economy of the future, whole countries specialize in particular industries, and in India, it’s tech support. Here we find a computer specialist, enlisted by an American company, who competes in a combat simulator to secure a lucrative contract – unaware of the game’s dark secret.