Fire On The Mountain, Chicken F’r Dinner
Nichole McMinn · 2026 · 18 minutes
Nearby wildfires bring more than smoke to a rural Appalachian town when a reclusive grandmother finds a bloody scene in her chicken coop. Struggling to protect what’s left and raise her young granddaughter alone, a strange presence in the woods forces her to confront what haunts them both.
Nichole McMinn is an NYC-based filmmaker originally from East Tennessee. She has art directed critically acclaimed films such as Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair and Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt. Nichole won the Black Family Prize for her screenplay Fire On The Mountain, Chicken F’r Dinner. Her documentary short Keepsake, premiered at DOC NYC in 2024 and screened at New Orleans Film Festival in 2025. She produced The Messiah’s Daughter, directed by Roxy Moskowitz, which premiered at the 2026 Palm Springs International Shortfest. She holds an MFA from NYU’s Graduate Film Program.
Roxy Moskowitz is a filmmaker from Brooklyn. She holds her MFA from NYU’s Graduate Film program and was a 2025-2026 Marcie Bloom Fellow. Raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish household, she spent her childhood smuggling books home from the Brooklyn Public Library. She studied philosophy at Rutgers University before transferring to Brooklyn College, where she earned a BA in film. Her latest short film, The Messiah’s Daughter, premiered at Palm Springs International ShortFest. She is developing her first feature about a woman who becomes addicted to the internet while training at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand.
Zach Land is a graduate of Recording Engineering from Full Sail University in Orlando Florida. After finishing school he began his production career as a cameraman and was eventually promoted to technical director of live programming at Jewelry Television. He has worked as a television video editor for Jupiter Entertainment on shows such as Snapped, Fatal Attraction, and Payback. Other projects he has been involved with include audio post production for myriad home improvement shows for RIVR media and live sound engineering for live music venues.