How a Short Film is Building a Movement
"Cow Heavy And Floral," a film by parents, continues to make big impact for Maternal Mental Health and Paid Family & Medical Leave.
Most short films follow a familiar trajectory. Festival submissions. A few laurels if you’re lucky. And then… a quiet release online. This process serves some filmmakers well (or well enough), but it surely wasn’t designed to maximize impact.
Writer-director Richa Rudola took a different approach with Cow Heavy And Floral, a split-screen narrative about a postpartum woman balancing love, ambition, and life as a working mother. Inspired by Richa’s own experience of early motherhood and titled after a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Morning Song,” the film was made by a team of mostly working parents whose conversations about inadequate support systems reinforced Richa’s goal to spark change.
So while Richa was submitting to festivals, she also joined an impact accelerator to get serious about how to actually realize her impact goals. Now Cow Heavy And Floral is entering year two of its release. What started with festival submissions has become a multi-year strategy targeting two very different audiences.
Here’s what the film team did, and how their 15-minute short is creating change.
Distribution Timeline:
January - December 2023: Richa participated in Regenerative Creation Cohort, a monthly group mentorship program.
Summer - Fall 2023: Pre-production & fundraising for the film. Seed&Spark for crowdfunding and private financing. “We raised over $50,000 to make the film during the industry strikes of 2023 and shot the film in Los Angeles. We had childcare in our budget. We were proud to provide employment and sustainable wages to industry workers and make art during a period of intense uncertainty.”
Summer 2024: Film completed after 6+ months of post production.
Fall 2024:
Looky Looky Pictures Impact Accelerator Lab.
Launched a private film page on Kinema to support corporate and nonprofit screenings and other grassroots efforts.
Festival circuit begins. Premiere at Tasveer Film Festival, followed by 8 more festivals and a jury award for Best Mom-Themed Film at 2025 Mom Film Fest.
Launch of Meals About Motherhood (MAM), a grassroots conversation series.
Winter 2024 - Spring 2025:
Impact Producer Emily Branham comes on board.
The film wins Open Television’s Atlas Fund Social Impact Grant.
Spring 2025: Key think tank partner New America comes on board to unlock a slate of advocacy partnership opportunities.
Summer - Fall 2025: In-person and virtual activations with nonprofits, employee resource group events, women’s health conferences.
Fall 2025 - future: A hometown festival screening at Lincoln Center in NYC, plus ongoing impact screenings.
The Festival Year
The core producing team felt the short had strong film festival potential and advised Richa to give the process five or six months before starting the impact work. So they waited.
“It was actually very difficult for me mentally,” Richa said. “You’re waiting, and every time you open your email, you hope it’s the one.”
All told, Cow Heavy And Floral has screened at eight festivals and Richa really enjoyed the experiences had and connections made. But when the Sundance rejection finally arrived something shifted.
“I got my first personalized Sundance rejection. I was disappointed, but I also just knew: the target audience of this film isn’t festival programmers. It’s the people who’ve now already become evangelists for the film.”
It was permission to “finally” get to work.
Two Audiences, Two Strategies
Richa identified her core audiences early: parents who needed community and validation, and advocates and policymakers who could actually change the system. With her producers and advisors from the programs she had participated in, Richa began to build distinct approaches for each audience type using Kinema to enable partner screenings.
Reaching Parents:
During her time in ReGEN’s year-long accelerator program (led by impact advisor Charlene Sanchenko), Richa developed the concept that became Meals About Motherhood (MAM), which she co-founded with three other women, one of whom is the film’s producer, Lela Meadow-Conner @mamafilm. The concept was straightforward, much like the organization’s name. Watch motherhood-centered films (including CHAF), then share a meal and talk about motherhood. For their launch, each co-founder dug into their networks to find their first hosts across 15 different cities in the US & Canada. That kickstarted a movement that’s still going.
Each gathering creates space for current, future, and agnostic parents to talk openly about the choices, pressures, and contradictions surrounding parenthood. These Meals happen everywhere: after film festival screenings, through women’s organizations, with parent groups like Park Slope Parents, and even with corporate ERGs (Employee Resource Groups).
People often underestimate the power of a short film simply because it isn’t a feature. In truth, the short format is ideal for grassroots screenings — 15 minutes of film followed by 30–45 minutes of conversation, all within a “lunch hour.” Organizations love it because it fits seamlessly into their workday, and participants love it because the opportunity to share and connect is genuinely meaningful.
Reaching Decision-Makers:
For the advocacy side, Richa courted filmmaker Emily Branham (who had been successfully running an impact campaign for her own film, Being BeBe) to be the impact producer for the film. It wasn’t a role that Emily had formally taken on in the past but she was persuaded by the film and by Richa’s encouragement.
The duo started at the top of the policy world. Emily mapped out who was shaping the national conversation around working parents. Then they began reaching out with targeted, personalized emails. Real, thoughtful outreach explaining why the film mattered and how it could uniquely support their important work.
Within two weeks of Emily’s outreach, things started to snowball. “It became a Fibonacci sequence,” Richa said. “Each connection built on the last, and it just kept growing.” The first person who responded was Vicki Shabo at New America’s Better Life Lab. She became a crucial partner — someone with a deep history and network among Paid Family Medical Leave advocates, who also believes in the power of narrative to shape culture and influence meaningful policy change. They started with a virtual screening and discussion with leading national-level advocates and maternal mental health experts — “the Braintrust,” as it was branded. That led to more screenings and state-level Braintrust events. And now Richa and Emily are screening the film and speaking at maternal health conferences as word of mouth about the film continues to spread.
They keep hearing that the film is accomplishing what facts and figures alone couldn’t. It’s helping isolated parents (including fathers and non-birthing parents) feel seen, and changing hearts and minds in a way that policy papers and statistics are often unable to.
The Full Impact Architecture
You know that E.L. Doctorow quote: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I was reminded of it as I was listening to the organic evolution of Cow Heavy And Floral’s impact work. One “mile” at a time, Emily and Richa have built a full framework for how to reach multiple audiences. Their research gave them a strategic entry point and through deep integration within these communities their impact has grown over two years.
They’ve shared some of that impact publicly:
With momentum growing, the team now fields inbound interest through a screening request form. Approved organizations are provided a link to CHAF’s private film page on Kinema to book screenings.
This is what CHAF’s efforts look like now:
For Parents:
Meals About Motherhood screenings and discussions
Corporate “lunch & learns” in partnership with Employee Resource Groups
For Advocates, Clinicians & Policymakers:
State-level and National Braintrusts: curated screenings with key stakeholders
Educational screenings, focusing on schools of social work and perinatal health
Maternal health conferences and conventions
Strategic partnerships with community & advocacy organizations that can use the film as a tool for gathering and catalyzing grassroots efforts
The Infrastructure:
This work was enacted by a strong team (including an impact producer, film producer, executive producer) and supported by a core group of advisors, champions of Richa’s previous work, and a few partners:
Seed&Spark for crowdfunding. “Audience-building starts early!”
Looky Looky accelerator: mentorship, resources, community.
ReGEN year-long cohort: mentorship, resources, community.
OTV Atlas social impact grant offering visibility, brand support, and funding.
Kinema for hosting turnkey screening events with organizations.
Summary
The festival circuit gave Cow Heavy And Floral credibility and press hooks. But the bits that are actually creating change are happening in conference rooms, advocacy convenings, and around lunch and dinner tables. And that work is also starting to get recognized. It has even led to an invitation from Ted Hope to speak on a 2025 Cannes American Pavilion panel about CHAF’s approach to audience-building.
Three takeaways from the team’s approach:
Don’t stop at festivals. If your short film has a clear purpose beyond “look what I made,” the festival circuit doesn’t have to be your endgame. Short films are uniquely suited to impact campaigns. You can move hearts and minds in under an hour, which is easy to fit into existing programming formats like lunch-and-learns, conferences, or community gatherings.
Plan for impact from the start. Start thinking about impact early — even in pre-production. Who needs to see this? What would you want them to do after watching? How can you reach those audiences? And when you’re building your team, focus on the person, not the title. (Richa didn’t need “impact producer” in Emily’s bio. She saw the skills, trusted the relationship, and invited her to step into the role.)
Reach the right fifteen people. A film shown to a small group of decision-makers (people who shape policy, or shift culture, or mobilize their own communities) can do more than a film that gets one thousand passive views on a streaming platform.
As Richa put it: “Creating art isn’t separate from living it. The film became a kind of laboratory for resilience, for curiosity, for community. Every screening, every meal, every conversation widens that circle.”
“Cow Heavy And Floral” will screen at the Lincoln Center on Saturday, November 8 as part of the Diversity & Inclusion Film Festival (tickets here). It will also screen at the Women’s Health Innovation Summit Conference in Boston on November 5 (event here).
So enjoyed talking to you yesterday, Ami!
The idea of targeting different audiences but being specific about these audiences and how to reach out to them is a really potent one. I do wonder though what something like this would look like outside of the festival circuit.