Feelers

Feelers is a surreal queer drama exploring intimacy, identity, and transformation through the story of Jude, a reserved art student whose night with the charismatic Frankie slowly unravels into something stranger and more visceral. What begins as a quiet flirtation over drinks turns into a sensual, uneasy spiral as Jude’s fascination with insects, especially the Pūriri moth, bleeds into reality. Set over the course of one night in Frankie’s cluttered flat, the film uses intimate performances, dreamy visuals, and bodily horror to capture the psychological discomfort of desire and the quiet terror of becoming. With themes of gender fluidity, fear of vulnerability, and the strange beauty of metamorphosis, Feelers is a coming-of-age story seen through a queer, metamorphic lens. At its heart, it’s about the messiness of letting someone see you, body, bugs, and all.

Feelers is led by a passionate team of emerging queer and gender-diverse creatives from across Wellingtons’s film and performing arts communities. The project is written and directed by Ro Woffenden and produced by Martine Bailey, whose practice both centers collaborative, queer-led productions with emotional specificity.

We’re backed by a 20+ person crew of students and early-career professionals, most studying across Massey University and Toi Whakaari. Our cast includes Toi Whakaari actors Margot Coleman and Molly Macalister, while the crew brings together talent across cinematography, sound, animation and practical effects. From our DOP Ruby Spencer to our composer Sarah Lawrence, the team shares a love of visually layered, emotionally resonant work.

This is a project with big creative ambition, a team of peers building something strange, tender, and bold together.

We’re aiming to raise $5,500 to support the production of Feelers, with every dollar going toward making this unsettling and beautiful world come alive. A significant portion of the funds will be used to pay our incredible actors, fund production design and special effects makeup, which will depict Jude’s transformation with high-impact visual texture and realism. Other key expenses include location dressing, and costume design that captures each character’s emotional state. Finally, we’ll allocate funds for crew catering, transport, and festival submission fees to ensure the film reaches wider audiences. This is a deeply collaborative student-led project, and your support helps us build something ambitious and affecting from the ground up.

We're making Feelers because we believe in telling nuanced queer stories that reflect the complexities of intimacy, identity, and the body. The idea emerged from conversations around queer desire and discomfort, especially the quiet, confusing moments that don’t always end in catharsis or clarity. For many queer people, especially trans or nonbinary individuals, intimacy can evoke both longing and fear, especially when self-perception feels unstable. Feelers uses horror and surrealism to explore that emotional terrain, reflecting how dysphoria, attraction, and bodily alienation can all intertwine. 

Feelers is a story that speaks to the unspoken, the awkwardness of queer intimacy, the quiet pressure to perform desire, and the surreal feeling of being in a body that doesn’t always feel like yours. It’s a film about consent, transformation, and emotional ambiguity, told through and elevated by horror, poetry, and visual texture. In a media landscape that often demands tidy narratives and marketable identities, Feelers carves out space for discomfort, complexity, and contradiction, especially for trans, nonbinary, and queer audiences who rarely see themselves reflected with honesty and imagination.

We’re part of a generation of emerging filmmakers wanting to tell personal, formally bold stories. With your support, we can bring this vision to life, not just for ourselves, but for the communities we represent. Backing this film helps nurture a growing network of queer creatives, and contributes to a richer, stranger, more honest future of storytelling.