Academy Award®-Nominated Filmmaker RaMell Ross and Emmy® Award Winner Stacey Reiss Join the Film as Executive Producers

Brooklyn, NY — September 3, 2026 — POV Shorts, the award-winning showcase for independent nonfiction short films, announced today it has acquired The Boys and the Bees, directed by Arielle Knight and produced by Sean Weiner. The short documentary is an intimate portrait of a Black family on a small farm in rural Georgia, sharing their love of nature and beekeeping while restoring their homestead. The film centers on two young brothers who discover beekeeping, and each other. As they learn to care for their hives and help restore their family’s land, the boys develop a deeper understanding of tenderness, responsibility, and the delicate ecosystems that mirror the bonds holding their family together. The Oscar®-qualifying Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction winner at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the films is also a recipient of the 2026 Shine Global Resilience Award AmDoc Prize, and will make its national broadcast and streaming debut as part of POV Shorts’ upcoming ninth season premiering in November 2026.

Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys, Hale County This Morning, This Evening) and Emmy® Award winner Stacey Reiss (The Andy Warhol Diaries, The Eagle Huntress, Hollywood Black) have joined the film as executive producers.

“What an absolute joy to join The Boys and the Bees team,” said RaMell Ross. “I was taken back by the film, its gift of time, its abundance of pathos, and the space to witness the Ray family emerge into themselves. I think there is something elevated about this observed tale, something almost mythical in its unfolding. It’s also just a space where the personal, the poetic, and the larger history of Black communities in America can all exist simultaneously.”

Stacey Reiss added, “We can all learn so much from this exquisitely crafted film — the value of family,  our relationship with the natural world and the bonds that hold all of us together. The kindness and trust displayed between Arielle and the Ray family demonstrates her astute ability as a filmmaker and talented storyteller.  I’m very proud to support her and her film.” 

“This film is an offering to the South, to Georgia, where I grew up, and to those brief, awe-filled moments of youth,” said Arielle Knight, director of The Boys and the Bees. “It's a testament to the power of cinema to widen our collective imagination — offering a more expansive representation of Black boyhood unburdened by stereotypes."

“The Ray family brings so much joy to the heart of this beautiful short film, which explores how we connect with those around us—whether they are our closest family or the animals with whom we share this planet,” added Sean Weiner, co-director and co-founder of UFO. “What is truly moving is how the Ray family’s warmth radiated beyond the camera and into the care with which Arielle and her team crafted this story. The spirit of collaboration and care permeated the entire project, and our team at UFO felt incredibly lucky to have been welcomed into this very special creative process.”

Through a patient, verité lens, The Boys and the Bees follows a year in the lives of Carver (6) and Aaro (4) alive with curiosity, as they wander fields, tend hives, and grow in their relationship with the land around them. Their parents, Eliza and Nehemiah Ray—partners in life, parenthood, and beekeeping—set out to reimagine Black family life, rooting it in the wisdom of the natural world. As they work toward restoring their homestead, the film traces their quiet efforts to raise their sons close to the land, transforming the rhythms of daily life into a tender meditation on childhood, inheritance, and legacy. From small, luminous moments—a frightened boy finding the courage to tend a beehive—a larger story unfolds: one of reparative healing and the deliberate work of building a family bound to the land. The Boys and the Bees is a tender yet radical portrait of self-determination, kinship, and love.

The Boys and the Bees deal was negotiated by Opal H. Bennett for American Documentary | POV Shorts.  

"The Boys and the Bees is a beautifully observed portrait about the small acts of courage that make a person — from a boy beekeeper's rite of passage to parents choosing a life rooted in the land,” said Opal H. Bennett, Executive Producer, POV Shorts and Senior Producer, POV. “It's the kind of film we want to platform at POV Shorts and Arielle Knight is the kind of filmmaker we want to champion." 

The Boys and the Bees continued its award-winning festival run with the Short Film Audience Award at the Atlanta Film Festival (2026), Best Documentary Short and Best of Fest at the Nevada City Film Festival (2026), Best Documentary Short at the Ouray Film Festival (2026) and Best Short Documentary at Salute Your Shorts (2026). It was also an Official Selection at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival (2026), Sheffield DocFest (2026) and True/False Film Fest (2026).

The Boys and the Bees is a GoodKnight Films and Untitled Filmmaker Org co-production. It is directed by Arielle Knight and produced by Knight and Sean Weiner. The director of photography is Fernando Rocha and the editors are Sean Weiner and Omar Guzman. Sound design is by Thomas Becka. The associate producer is Alessandra Puig-Santana, and the film advisors are Arno Mokros and Martha Gregory. The executive producers are RaMell Ross, Stacey Reiss, and Opal H. Bennett, Erika Dilday, and Chris White for American Documentary | POV.

True to its founding mission, POV Shorts remains rooted in a distinctly “point of view” approach, presenting powerful, timely stories and continuing POV’s legacy as a vital public media platform for bold documentary storytelling. Curated with an “arthouse-accessible” sensibility, the series treats short-form documentary as a vital form for this moment: compact, inventive films that illuminate urgent issues through the lives of real people and invite constructive conversation across differences.

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