Nailah Jefferson

Nailah Jefferson is a native New Orleans filmmaker intrigued and inspired by the enduring human spirit, whose films span fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent film, COMMUTED, premiered at the 2023 New Orleans Film Festival where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary and Best Louisiana Documentary. COMMUTED is broadcasting and streaming via PBS and WORLD Channel / AfroPop. 2023 also saw the debut of Nailah’s HBO Original documentary, DONYALE LUNA: SUPERMODEL, an official selection of the American Black Film Festival and Sheffield Film Festival and the Huffington Post named it one of the best films of 2023. In 2021, she released the short documentary Descended From The Promised Land: The Legacy of Black Wall Street, screening at DOCNYC, Martha’s Vineyard Black Film Festival and the Social Justice Film Festival, and is currently streaming on Black Public Media’s AfroPop Youtube channel. In 2016 Nailah won the inaugural Create Louisiana Award for her short fiction script Plaquemines, her fiction directorial debut. Plaquemines premiered at the 2017 New Orleans Film Festival and in 2018 it was chosen as an American Black Film Festival HBO Shorts finalist, streaming on HBO platforms until 2020, and now available on ShortsTV.

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ABOUT COMMUTED

When Danielle Metz’s triple life sentence was commuted, she got a rare chance to regain the life and family that she’d been dreaming about in prison. But back home in New Orleans, she steps into a different reality. Commuted traces Danielle’s journey to find purpose and love, and to confront the wounds of incarceration that linger after release from prison.

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