Professional ambition and family aspirations

Despite having lived on the festival circuit for over half a decade, I had never been to Sundance until the second to last Park City edition rolled around in 2025. For many reasons, it felt like the stakes were high: first and foremost, the elevation messes with your emotions; I was also there with a film for the first time in my new iteration of my professional life; and had recently become a mum. Festivals had always been a place where I felt confident and in control, and here I was suddenly feeling uncertain in this new capacity and in a body I still wasn’t comfortable in.

Luckily, on the first night I ended meeting up with Roger Mancusi. Like many people, we’d connected online before, and I had been encouraged to see someone else who had moved from a different facet of film into producing. Then, within minutes of sitting down at some mediocre beer hall in the Utah mountains, we really clicked: he asked about my baby and immediately whipped out his phone to show me pictures of his newborn.

As Roger writes about below, there can be a palpable sense of relief when meeting another parent at a festival or just generally in film. Even if their lives are vastly different, it feels like a beacon of hope in a sea of dissenting voices, and structural realities, that seem to be questioning your life choices.

While texting about his new movie, Katarina Zhu’s Bunnylovr (which is now available to rent), I asked Roger if he’d want to write something on what it was like to produce both human and artistic life at the same time. (Something I deeply relate to!) Roger, in response, penned a beautiful personal essay on producing, fatherhood, and the pressures we put on ourselves in both realms.

As I wrote about in my first newsletter, the idea behind Care Takes is normalizing talking about being a parent in film. Talking to Roger has felt like that in action, and I’m so grateful he wanted to share this.

- Kiva

Odds are, if you’ve run into me at a party or screening (on the rare occasion I leave the house these days) and asked, “What’s new, Rog?”, I’ve most likely hit you with my delirium-induced, auto-pilot response of: “You know, just parenting and producing.” Since 2024, I’ve been on a joyous, tiring, head-spinning journey of professional self-discovery and re-imagination with moving into producing full time. And all while also learning how to care for one, and then in quick succession, two babies. (Not quite Irish twins, but what I call Italian twins. Let me have this.)

In early 2024, I signed on to produce Katarina Zhu’s feature debut Bunnylovr, which follows a cam girl in New York reconnecting with her estranged father and balancing increasingly bizarre requests from her main camming client. Shortly after, I discovered I would be a father when my wife and I excitingly found out we were having our first baby. Suddenly, I had to reconcile two very different prep schedules. The math seemed simple when I broke it down: it’ll take nine months for the baby to arrive, so that’s eight months to make a movie. The team was very gracious when I made my problem our problem, and off we went.

By the grace of the indie film gods, our team burning boats to make it happen, and the immeasurable help of Rachel Sennott, Bunnylovr did indeed come together for August 2024. Then my son arrived prematurely shortly thereafter.

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There was a time in my twenties when I was admittedly unsure about how the tension between my professional ambitions and family aspirations would play out. I was working at the Ac*demy, surrounded by the best filmmakers on the planet, and sometimes, after sharing air with the Scorseses and Bongs of the world, I’d feel pressured to shed everything, put my head down and work like crazy, then come up for air in my forties to settle down. To quote Neil McCauley in Heat, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” I thought that could be my future and the ticket to getting out of what felt like a dead-end job.

But there was one upside of that position: I was able to see firsthand how that mentality plays out in this industry. A majority of the regulars were lovely, but there were some that were late in life, alone, and angry. These fallen giants and former heads of department would use the events I staffed as a way of reminding lower down people (like me) that they once could make the industry shake with one phone call. They’d berate me about who-knows-what while their nurse would stand to the side with a blank, wordless expression, maybe in silent appreciation that they weren’t the target for a few minutes.

I wish every bull-headed, career-obsessed 20-something guy can have this Christmas Carol-esque experience to see what their creatively fulfilled, but lonely future holds. My guess is that they, like I did, would recoil in horror and go and marry their girlfriend too. (As an aside, years later I mentioned to a well-established producer I was hoping to work for that I was engaged and he told me, “You know you can’t be both married and be a producer, right?” Fuck him.) I had decided I wanted to leave behind more than just a body of work, and was very O.K. with the decision to learn how to produce and be on a path to parenthood at the same time.

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By Memorial Day of 2024, my two worlds were preparing for their respective big arrivals ahead. In film land, we had raised just barely enough money to not feel 100% delusional about filming in August, and my wife and I were now in the process of looking for a new apartment to accommodate our growing family. At that point, I had already reached full cortisol saturation. So why not add an apartment hunt on top of everything else?

But if there’s one thing that producing can prepare a parent-to-be for, it’s a series of high stakes logistics, shifting goalposts, and future problem solving. The spring and early summer was spent ping-ponging between doctors’ offices, prep meetings, location scouts, and apartment walk-throughs. The summer itself was hard prepping for the film while preparing my home life for my absence by stocking the freezer with batch-cooked meals for my wife and hiring my out-of-work film friends to help walk our dog, Buster, while I was away on set. Thankfully, production was relatively smooth, in large part to our production and AD team who lifted me up and were understanding when my foggy, dad-to-be brain started to lag.

My plan for the fall after wrap was neatly laid out. Be in the can by my birthday in late August and jump into the edit, nest all September with my wife, move in October, deliver the rough cut to Sundance by their extended deadline mid-October, then have the baby at the end of the month.

But just like on a film set, you can make all the plans you want, and then sometimes your wife shakes you awake in the middle of the night and off you go. It was mid-September, our hospital bags were not packed, and our talent was arriving earlier than planned–five and a half weeks to be exact. While at the hospital, I let the team know I wouldn’t be in the edit room that day, or probably for a while. My brother and dad met a moving truck I called to hastily get our stuff down the block to our new place, while we figured out what to name our beautiful son, who was still listed as Baby Boy Mancusi in his NICU-station.

At this point in my memory, everything else melts away and I can only remember living in a hospital with my wife, spending time with our son who was slowly learning how to breathe and eat on his own, and only assuming that life was continuing outside the NICU but not really caring enough to check and confirm. It was like that for a few weeks before my son was discharged and we were finally able to take him home with us.

Shortly after re-entering society as a father and barely getting back to the swing of things, I got the call that Bunnylovr was accepted into Sundance. A race to finish the film was on. While I was balancing the cascade of new emotions and responsibilities that come with the new title of “Dad,” I was also balancing post vendors from around the world, and learning in real time that two months is really not enough time to finish a film. All the stressors and excitement of this moment started to blur together as well: I would look forward to going to the edit bay as much as I would be thrilled to come home to my family, and I found myself exponentially appreciative of both worlds.

Going to Sundance (more on that in Max Cea’s newsletter “Nothing Bogus) was the first time I left my son and was meeting other parents (including none other than Kiva Reardon, who I was tangential co-workers with at the Ac*demy, but never really got to know well). For the first time, I started to bond with someone over being a parent. It was such a welcome experience amidst the chaos and stress, and I remember how much it helped me feel close to my son even though he was back in Chicago with his grandparents.

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Connecting with other film biz parents has become one of my favorite perks of parenthood. Whether we’re filmmakers, producers, financiers, actors, whatever, if someone finds out you have kids, it seems we’re able to finally drop the act and really connect as humans. It’s a moment when you realize this is all very, very silly, and that we’re just lucky adults who get to play make-believe for a living. To think there was a time when I would’ve sacrificed the very real experience of being a dad for the very ephemeral task of producing makes me shudder. (N.B., this does not mean I don’t love what I do and am not creatively fulfilled by my work, let’s not conflate emotional and professional distance with indifference.)

Yet it’s still treated like a Herculean feat when people hear you have kids and also work in the industry; the “How do you do it all?” mindset, which I hate, speaks to a larger, systemic issue we, specifically producers, should be honest about confronting. Why shouldn’t we be able to have families? How have we let our industry and profession rot to the point where the Established Producer from Act I of this essay might have had a point? What can we do to ensure that our colleagues who are facing down a choice to have a family don’t feel like it’s such a zero sum game?

I don’t claim to have all the answers to that (though I do think groups like Producers United are making strides to answer tangible questions about our profession’s viability), but I know that I am so happy to at least have allowed myself to try and find them. So much so that my wife and I had another baby in February of this year, and yes, yet again, I produced a movie in January, wrapping just under the wire. This go-around was a little easier, despite what the beleaguered bags under my eyes indicate.

So, now as a father of two with a full slate of exciting projects, I can’t help but think back to the 20-something version of me: sitting alone on a curb in Midtown at midnight, eating from a halal cart after getting berated at a screening, wondering what my future holds, and how the hell I was going to get out of there. I wish that guy could close his eyes and see his two boys playing together on the floor, with a phone pinned to his ear, answering calls from agents while making dinner, the dog is barking and he’s bumping into his wife who’s helping clean baby bottles. I know he’d be happy to see this version of his future. And, yes, he’d probably be a little scared too. But I’m glad that won’t stop him.

Roger Mancusi is a producer, professor, and founder of his production and consulting company Fair Oaks Entertainment, which specializes in independent storytelling from emerging talent. His credits include the features HANNAH HA HA (2022 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Fiction and Acting Award), MUTT (2023 Sundance Best Actor Award), BUNNYLOVR (2025 Sundance Competition), and THE SCOUT (2025 Tribeca Competition). In the short film space, he produced Reece Feldman’s debut WAIT, YOUR CAR? which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché Du Film sidebar. As an adjunct professor, Mancusi teaches Strategies for Independent Producing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is based in Brooklyn.