Joe Duca

Writer-director Joe Duca with his debut feature-length film, EVERGREEN (2020), won the Houston Broadcast Critics Association's Best Picture, Best Actress, & Best Supporting Actress Awards, Hunter Mountain Film Festival's Best Director, and the Fort Worth Indie Film Showcases Audience Choice Award. The film has been distributed through Indiecan Pictures in December 2020.
He unveiled his second full-length feature film, HER NAME WAS JO, in 2020, at the Lighthouse International Film Festival, and went on to win Best Narrative Feature at Filmocracy Fest before securing North American distribution through Gravitas Ventures, and teaming with Wide Management for international sales. HER NAME WAS JO has been digitally released in April 2021.

Director's statement
“This may be the story of an orphan, but it took a family to craft. I had been living in LA for two years, acting in some little things here and there, bar-backing downtown, and had just written my first script, and couldn’t seem to get it off the ground. I was feeling down and lonely when I remembered something my Dad had asked me the previous Christmas “Why don’t we just make a movie ourselves? Family-Style Filmmaking. Write it around stuff we know we can get, and resources we know we have?” I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist. So that’s what we did. I wrote the script taking inspiration from circumstances surrounding the birth of my sister, and developed the story with her and my Dad’s input, and she plays Selma. My Dad helped produce and worked props, Mom was in charge of crafty. In addition to playing the bad guys, my brothers Michael and Daniel were 2nd AD and art department, respectively. [...] My sister is grown up now. But we really did it, we made a family movie. HER NAME WAS JO tries to press the question, “What can you give when everything’s been taken?” We shot with a Neo-realist style that’s intended to be as scrappy and whimsical as its namesake. I hope this film serves both as an examination of what hides beneath the dark side of Americana, the brutality and generational damage of inherited trauma lurking there, and as a touching tribute and sentimental exploration of childhood innocence and its resilience in the face of that shadow. We tried to make something that was by turns both lyrical and brutal, plucky and poetic; this coming-of-age journey of a young girl longing for and seeking her father hopefully touches the orphaned heart in us all, and affirms the pursuit of hope in a territory largely held by despair.”