A collaboratively run production company exploring the edges of genre and story.

Founded on Friendship

Samantha Curley and Chase Joynt met at a 2013 screening of Chase’s first short film, I’m Yours. The two stayed in touch and a few years later, Chase asked Samantha to produce his next film. While Samantha had never produced a film before and wasn’t sure she could do it, Chase said something to the effect of: “You produce everything all the time. Let’s just try it and see what happens.” After their wildly successful collaboration on Framing Agnes, the two friends officially launched Level Ground Productions in December 2021.


  • Samantha Curley is an award-winning film producer and creative entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. She is the Co-Founder of Level Ground, a 501(c)3 artist collective and production incubator creating experiments in empathy. Together with Chase Joynt, she also founded and runs Level Ground Productions.

    The first film she produced, Framing Agnes (dir. Chase Joynt), premiered as a short at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and then as a feature at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won both the NEXT Innovator Award and Audience Award. Her next film, Union (dir. Steve Maing, Brett Story) will premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

    She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the Kellogg School of Management and has fellowships with NBC Original Voices, PGA Create, and Impact Partners.

    Photo by Meredith Adelaide.

  • Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His debut documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and Audience Award.

    With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won 9 awards on the international festival circuit, including being named to TIFF Canada’s Top Ten.

    Joynt’s first book You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and CBC.

    Most recently, he directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories for the CW, which are now streaming on Netflix. With Samantha Curley, Chase runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles.

    Photo by Wynne Neilly.

About Level Ground Productions

Level Ground Productions is a collaboratively run production company invested in projects that push the boundaries of form and address urgent socio-political issues. We exist, in part, to support the Level Ground Collective – a 501(c)3 nonprofit artist collective and incubator that centers queer, trans and POC artist-led projects and initiatives. Both the Level Ground nonprofit and the production company reflect the same values and mission, including a commitment to experimentation, collaboration, and empathy. Every year, Level Ground Productions shares 25% of our profits with the Collective. 

Our Slate

  • Framing Agnes Iconic Image

    FRAMING AGNES

    After discovering case files from a 1950s gender clinic, a cast of trans actors turn a talk show inside out to confront the legacy of a young trans woman forced to choose between honesty and access.

    Premiered at 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

  • JFK8 Iconic Image

    UNION

    The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) — a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island — takes on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize.

    Premiering at 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

  • Oranssi project: wraparound deck

    THE NEST

    The Nest explores radical maternities, interracial alliances, and colonial histories across 140 years of Canadian history through the story of a single house.

    Currently in post production with the National Film Board of Canada.

  • PROXIMITY PRINCIPLE

    Upending the format of the true crime documentary, The Proximity Principle invests in various forms of proximity to child sexual abuse and abusers to unpack the complex relationship between shame, whiteness and masculinity.

    Currently in development.

Thanks to support from:

Our Values

  • We understand that the ability to develop and produce a film (or other media project) relies on a kind of financial privilege that – given our economic and political climate – is inaccessible to many. We aim to leverage what access and privilege we can collectively gain, and redistribute it in ways that support underrepresented filmmakers, creators, and their communities.

  • Film and media projects take years to make. With this in mind, we believe the way a project gets made is just as important as the project itself. We go to great lengths to build long-term relationships with everyone who is part of the filmmaking process. We prioritize the mental, physical, and financial health of our teams. We foster affirming sets that can accommodate everyone’s needs and are accessible to non-professionalized and/or emerging artists.

  • We work to ensure that the people who make a project possible also have the opportunity to participate in its commercial success. This means our financial and personal commitment to support the participants and communities whose lives are shared on screen. A portion of the profits from each of our films goes to support individuals, communities, and organizations aligned with that project.

  • We are mindful of who has access to tell what kinds of stories, how those stories are told, and how impacted communities (particularly vulnerable ones) are included in a project. Our projects center the voices, perspectives, health, and sustainability of those most necessary to the story. We also believe that the story being told in front of the camera should be reflected in hiring decisions regarding who works behind the camera.

  • We are interested in films that resist commodification and filmmakers who take risks and explore genre hybrids. We strive to make space for filmmakers working on critical issues related to race, class, and gender, as well as filmmakers experimenting in new forms of art, media and storytelling.

  • We support films that will spark important conversations for the people who make them, fund them, and watch them.

 

  • "Meta to the max — but intuitively, revealingly so."

    Justin Chang, LA Times

  • "An exhilarating endeavor, cerebral, but accessible and often and deeply moving, that continually demands its viewer to be an active participant."

    James Kleinmann, The Queer Review

  • "This richly heady, thoughtful documentary is constantly welcoming us in by reflecting on itself.”

    Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com

  • “There is an outcome of care and artistic license that drapes this documentary, and it is fascinating. This education-minded and creative expression allow the film to realize truth, dignity, courtesy, and grace for all.”

    Sabina Dana Plasse, Film Threat