Lissette Feliciano

May Filmmaker of the Month

A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Feliciano is a Tribeca Film Institute AT&T Untold Stories grant recipient and was named as one of Shoot Magazine’s new directors to watch. She has worked with brands such as Target, Google, DC, and Procter & Gamble across various campaigns.

Her first feature film premiered at SXSW 2021 and went on to be acquired by HBO MAX. Her production company, Look at the Moon Pictures, develops original content that shines a hero's lens on underrepresented groups, joining the ranks of creators filling the market gap in storytelling for a new young, multicultural audience.

Under Feliciano’s leadership, Look at the Moon was among the first production companies to mandate 50 percent BIPOC representation across leadership positions on and off-camera.

She is repped by VERVE and managed by Authentic and Adelman Matz P.C.

Learn more about Lissette Feliciano on Instagram!

“Women is Losers” Director’s Statement

For as long as I can remember people have been telling me what I can’t do. Doctors, pastors, professors, family members, televisions, statistics, boyfriends, the chatty cabbie picking me up from JFK. Everyone.

Sometimes they’d say it outright, like when my doctor said I wouldn’t walk past my twenties thanks to a ridiculous and ironic early-onset case of rheumatoid arthritis. (My grandmother and I used to fight over the Bengay).

But most of the time — and much harder to detect — the “I can’t” was in the things they wouldn’t say. The opportunities I wasn’t encouraged to go for. The quiet reception to a carefully laid out plan. The amusement at my “ambitious” goals.

The sigh. The smile. The nothingness.

I have since learned to survive by hearing what people aren’t saying. But before I learned to survive, I cracked. I cracked under the weight of that nothingness.

I came home to my mother broken and ashamed for my failures. Devastated to tell her that despite our joint efforts, the hard work ethic she’d instilled in me, the don’t cry mantra we’d repeated as children, and the grindstone she’d practically surgically attached to my head - that there was something - something I couldn’t see or even explain but that I could feel as clearly as my own heartbeat standing in my path.

I waited for her, a woman who had worked three jobs to gain financial independence, whose body was irreparably broken from the effort, to tell me to suck it up.

She didn’t.

Instead, she told me everything. With a maddening sense of humor, she told me how little she still made at a job she’d been in for forty years. She produced a letter from her boss congratulating her on the birth of her son but notifying her in no uncertain terms that she’d used up her two weeks of “vacation” to recover from abdominal surgery also known as a c-section and needed to return to work. She told me about needing her stepfather to co-sign on her home loan because the bank wanted “assurances” that she could make the payments even though her stepfather did not have employment at the time.

She told me how all of this was legal in the ’60s and ’70s. That even though none of it is legal on paper anymore, it’s all still happening. What I was feeling, she said, was in fact real.

And then she spoke the words that to my surprise were the hardest to hear. She told me not to lose hope.

Through the sadness of what could have been, she shone through and through with gratitude for the little that she was able to achieve. She still believed in America. She still believed this was the land of opportunity. In no uncertain terms of her own, she shared with me that now that I knew the truth my job was to keep believing.

And now I’m sharing that with you.

In every way, “Women is Losers” is that conversation with my mother. The hidden wounds, the unsaid truths of our parents generation brought out into the light to help our own. It is a film where our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, fathers talk to us about everything and I mean everything they swept under the rug. It’s a movie that says the unwritten rules of our world out loud. But most importantly it’s a movie that asks you to hold onto your hope.

It’s bold, it’s humorous, it’s honest -- like my mother and like myself. And yes, it’s everything I was told I can’t do.

Lissette Feliciano