Doc - The Mirage

Documentary Feature

Title: The Mirage

TRT: not completed

Project Status: nearing the end of production

Logline 

The Mirage reveals how the American dream has failed so many, and how one unconventional workplace offers a radical alternative. Beyond stilettos, booze, and cash, The Mirage is an intimate, unapologetic portrait of four women in North Florida navigating chronic illness, caregiving, religious exile, and economic instability — and the strip club that offers them not just survival, but dignity.

Synopsis

The Mirage is a character-driven feature documentary set inside The Pony, a strip club in Pensacola, Florida. The film follows four women—Sienna, Lotus, Eden, and Katya—over several years as they navigate work, family, health, and identity within an economy that is both stigmatized and essential to their survival.

Bookended by sunset and sunrise, the film compresses years of lived experience into one cinematic night. We begin with preparation: dancers doing their hair and makeup, cooking for their children, and driving long distances to work. As the night unfolds, so do the stakes—packed rooms and fast cash give way to slow shifts and the quiet anxiety of making ends meet.

Each woman moves through this world with distinct pressures. Sienna balances single motherhood with caring for her father, who has Alzheimer’s. Lotus, living with Cystic Fibrosis, works within the limits of the “benefits cliff,” where earning too much could cost her access to life-saving medication. Eden, a classically trained opera singer raised in the Pentecostal Church, is reclaiming her voice and autonomy. Katya, a strategic and highly skilled dancer, travels across state lines for higher wages, approaching the work with precision and discipline.

Alongside these personal stories is the evolution of The Pony itself, culminating in a trip to the Exotic Dancer Expo in Las Vegas, where the club seeks industry recognition.

Blending cinéma vérité with stylized reenactments, The Mirage uses movement as a central storytelling tool, capturing the embodied reality of the work. The film reframes the strip club as a site of skill, strategy, and negotiation, inviting viewers into the complexity of women’s labor—where autonomy and constraint coexist, and survival requires navigating systems not built to hold them.

Additional Project Information

I have been meditating on this film for years. As a former stripper, I am connected to this story through personal experience. Strip clubs are a curious space where all the complexities of the outside world—gender, sexuality, race, class, ability—converge in striking and often contradictory ways. I have always known that these places are ripe with stories but not the sensationalized ones we have seen before. It is a world full of human narratives that have the capacity to reach across communities and teach empathy, tolerance, and acceptance.

Now 30 years removed from the job, I approach the story with a nuanced perspective and I reflect on this distance often. As a mother with a teenage daughter, these issues remain urgent; the defense of women’s autonomy and safety is nonnegotiable. My years as a dance professor, helping young dancers cultivate confidence in their physical presence, have shown me the intelligence of embodied agency and the narrative force of movement. Knowledge of one’s physical self is power.

As a documentary filmmaker, I use the camera to amplify voices that are marginalized or misrepresented. From the start, the film was envisioned as a story led by the body — using its intelligence as a visual and kinesthetic storytelling vehicle. As Martha Graham said, “The body does not lie.” I believe we carry countless stories in our bodies, expressed in the ways we move through the world, whether freely or with restraint. Through vérité footage and stylized reenactments, I aim to explore how the experience of stripping can be transcendent, transformative, or transgressive.

Team

Director:
Tiffany Rhynard creates dances, films, and interactive media to illuminate the lived experience and human cost of injustice. Her documentary Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America, received a 2018 Television Academy® Honor for its airing on LogoTV in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), received the first-ever Social Justice Film Award from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and is currently screening on Amazon Prime. She served as Director of Photography on the documentary project, Not My Enemy, directed by Kehinde Ishangi. The film premiered at the Veteran Film Festival in Sydney, Australia, received the Best PTSD Therapy Documentary at the Austin Veterans Veteran/Military Film Festival, and is currently screening on KweliTV. Rhynard’s dance films have screened at festivals nationwide and internationally including Dance on Camera at the American Dance Festival and ScreenDance Miami where she was awarded the Jury Prize for Invisible Queens (2015) and for Black Stains (2018). She is an Associate Professor in the School of Dance at Florida State University where she teaches Improvisation, Composition, and Dance Technology. Rhynard is currently in production for the feature documentary The Mirage, an intimate unapologetic portrait of four women navigating labor justice in the sex and entertainment industry.

Producer:
Andi Avery is a multimedia artist & filmmaker currently based in NYC. Their narrative film credits include Leaving Charlie and Eighty Twenty, both based on their experiences as a queer person and sex worker, and both shot by a crew composed entirely of women and gender expansive folks. Their most recent film, Mishpucha, was awarded the Black Family Film Prize in 2023 and is currently in post-production. Andi’s film work has been exhibited at Atlanta Film Festival, Nitehawk Cinema, and London International Film Festival, among others.

Editor:
Ace McColl is an Atlanta based filmmaker + editor. Her work leans into the experimental, telling intimate stories around femininity and familial memory through visceral means. Often auto-biographical, her filmmaking toes the line between performance and video art through her incorporation of multimedia elements. Her award-winning short films have been featured in several gallery exhibitions across the Southeast and screened at numerous festivals including Atlanta Film Festival, Indie Memphis and Cucalorus. As a film & TV editor she has worked with Netflix, Vice Media, Discovery Channel, PBS, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Tyler Perry Studios among many others. Her documentary editing work has been nominated for multiple Emmy’s and her most recent project for PBS was awarded a Southeastern Emmy.

Financials

We’re pursuing a multi-pronged fundraising strategy led by producer Andi Avery, who draws on long-standing relationships within the sex worker arts community, the film festival circuit, and NYU Grad Film alumni and faculty. Our approach includes grant applications (e.g., Chicken & Egg, Southern Documentary Fund), a targeted Seed & Spark campaign, and outreach to academic and nonprofit sponsors. As we move into post, we’re pursuing executive producers and potential celebrity support. Our social media intern is building engagement with aligned communities (burlesque, cosplay, etc.), while our fiscal sponsor, Southern Documentary Fund, continues to provide strategic guidance around marketing and distribution.

Funds raised so far:
$20,000 grant from Florida State University
$15,000 of personal funds
$5,000 Private Investment
$20,000 value of in kind donations – labor & gear

Funding needed to complete production and post-production: $75,000

Seeking

Investors, Producing Partners, and Distribution

Rights Available

All rights available

Project Website

https://www.themiragedocumentary.com/

Contact

Tiffany Rhynard, Sisters Unite Productions LLC

sistersuniteproductions06@gmail.com