STRAW 2025: A Mother’s Silence Was Louder Than a Siren
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.

“Cockroach is a handmade, cameraless animated film constructed with basic materials found around the home - newspaper, ink and Kool-Aid. Using cockroaches as a metaphor for language, it chronicles the pervasiveness and endurance of these primordial creatures. Text by Christian Cotroneo ("It's a bug's life in downtown Toronto," originally printed in the Toronto Star) is used to create the soundtrack.”
A haunting look at grief, survival, and a mother’s quiet collapse in a world that never gave her room to fall.
It’s 5:30am. The baby’s crying, but you need to finish prepping for your big pitch at work that morning. What do you do? You do the near impossible: both. That's what "Workin' Moms" is all about.
That gut-wrenching feeling you have while watching it is okay but needed, and you, the viewer, will be okay.
There were too many irrelevant parts that could have been shortened, and too many characters that didn't advance the plot. Either way, some things didn't add up. This was just another played out plot with little, if any, originality in it. By the end of the film, I wasn't happy that she finally got her freedom, I was happy that it was finally over.
These openly gay Hollywood figures risked so much by being honest about their sexuality: judgment, loss of employment, hate – even violence and death.