Rainbow Girls: Frameline 2025 Completion Fund Spotlight

Rainbow Girls
Directed by Nana Duffuor · USA 🇺🇸 · 16 mins

As San Francisco’s tech boom gentrifies their city, three young black trans women decide to take matters into their own hands, staging an audacious heist targeting the city’s most exclusive luxury brands. Rainbow Girls was executive produced by Cheryl Dunye and Nava Mau (Baby Reindeer). The film stars Jai Stephenson, Sis Thee Doll, Céline Jackson, and Nava Mau.

From the first time I heard of the Rainbow Girls, I was fascinated. I was living in Oakland at the time, when the influx of wealth from the tech industry spurred unprecedented levels of displacement. The story centers around the friendship between three young Black trans women, pushed to society’s margins, who unapologetically push back by looting luxury items associated with the type of wealth, privilege, and prestige that they are too often denied. Rainbow Girls is a film that calls obedience into question, and is as much about transgression as it is about the need for community.

Nana Duffuor (she/her) is a Black queer, first generation Ghanaian filmmaker based in New York City. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Film at Columbia University. Nana is passionate about telling stories that center characters and communities not often seen on screen. Her work thoughtfully blends heart and humor to explore themes that lie at the intersection of the personal and political.

In 2023, she made history as the first-ever Columbia film student to direct an international short film in Ghana. Her film, Confirmation, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in the New York African Film Festival, and went on to screen at numerous other festivals across the U.S. and abroad, including the Academy Award-qualifying Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival, where the film received Honorable Mention. Her next short film project, Rainbow Girls, will be released in 2025, with plans to develop it into a feature.

Nana is also a recipient of Columbia’s 2023 Bobby Kashif Cox Memorial Scholarship and the 2022 New York Women in Film & Television Scholarship.