VICTORIA SRACE STONE

Victoria is an award-winning filmmaker, musician, photographer and ubergeek. Victoria has directed, produced and/or shot over twenty feature and short narrative, documentary, experimental and animation films that have screened at numerous festivals, commercial theaters and online.

Victoria’s father purchased a manual 35mm camera when she was 12 and her love of image-making began. After seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1984, Victoria felt the call to make movies. She ended up at University of North Carolina at Greensboro but dropped out broke with no connections.

In 2000, she returned to filmmaking, producing a number of short narrative films and commercial world but in 2004, began developing a project that would become the most ambitious multiplane photoanimation film in history, In Saturn's Rings, narrated by LeVar Burton. A distributor mandated version was released in 2018 but after winning back the rights in 2024, Victoria is working on the release of "The Director's Cut" as well as native and feature-length versions.

After overcoming a career-ending diagnosis of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome in 2021, Victoria has resumed work on her writer/director debut feature, a sci-fi microbudget film Astrogenesis.

Victoria teaches film part-time at her alma mater, UNC-G and is also partnered with filmmaker Ellie Pobis via ESP Co-Pro, both collaborating to create relentlessly independent narrative feature films. Victoria lives in Greensboro, NC married to the artist Marie Stone and three cats, Obi, Kylo & Gypsy.


  • Zero AI. None. Not at all*. I and all crew members don't use AI for any aspect of filmmaking or non-filmmaking. While certain non-generative machine learning software have limited applications for audio noise reduction, masking and rotoscoping, anything that attempts to replace any human work or creativity is rejected even if it's not strictly generative AI.
  • My films are trans forward, our lead protagonists are usually trans since I write my own scripts. While only a few percent of the population is trans, not even close to 1% of films feature trans lead characters. I make films I want to watch. I want to watch films with trans lead characters.
  • My casts and crews are primarily female, gender-diverse, diverse in general. I always gravitated to this but now it's part of our mission. Women, trans, people of color and other non-white heterosexual males are still wildly underrepresented in film. It's my personal mission to make a difference. It also happens it makes for fantastic crews and working sets. True diversity makes for better films, better audiences and a better world.
  • As a disabled filmmaker, accessible filmmaking is a core part of our work. We don't shoot 12 hour days. Or even 8 most days. No 6 or 7 day weeks. We take breaks, we have fun, we relax, we recover. Making films is hard but it can and should be primarly fund and uplifting. And we've found our filmmaking is so much better this way, shot are in focus, acting performances are expectional, little time or energy is wasted. Small, happy crews = good films at modest cost.
  • Last, but most importantly, we practice what we preach about safety. None of the above is possible if cast and crew does not feel emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically safe. Nothing stops fun, nothing destroy creativity than even the possibility of unsafe filmmaking. 

*Before you sent me an email about either than inevitability of AI or some new "ethical AI" or "fear of new technology", let me be clear. I've been on the cutting edge of technology since I taught myself basic programming in 1982 on an Apple II. I was early beta tester of Midjourney in late 2022, became a paying customer in Jan 2023. I also beta tested Runway and Eleven Labs. However, I was quickly appalled at the rampant copyright theft I found. Angered by the severe racial, gender and class biases. I was done with AI even before the environmental costs became clear. And even without those damning issues, I found AI prompting to be utterly boring. I would honestly rather be an accountant. 

ESP Co-Pro: My core partnership with my dear friend, amazingly talented and closest collaborator, filmmaker Ellie Pobis https://espcopro.com/

Marie Stone Art: Marie is not only my wife but a key contributor to most of my films, especially on the art direction side of filmmaking. https://mariestoneart.com/

Tiffany Albright: My films today would be impossible without the support, expertise and energy of Tiffany Albright, a great writer and filmmaker herself https://tiffany-albright.com/

I immediately fell in love with taking photographs. I shot thousands of prints and slides. But making movies never crossed my mind. I actually only seen a handful of movies as at age 4, my mom had joined the sect/cult my Dad had grown up in, the Two-by-Twos or Cooneyites. They forbade movies, TV, fiction books, popular music and such. At age 6, my dad had rejoined.

Fortunately, they were not 100% strict. Despite growing up without a TV, my mom who had loved classic Hollywood movies as child, would take us to one or two a year. And after months of debate, my brother and I were allowed to see Star War. The very same year I got my Minolta.

Of course, like most 10 year olds in 1977, we loved Star Wars. But in my sheltered world, I actually did not know that people make movies. That there were jobs or careers around making movies or even any sense of how they were made at all. I wanted to be an astronaut or maybe a princess. 

But storytelling started young for me. While I devoured non-fiction books on airplanes and rockets, space travel, Carl Sagan's Cosmos make a huge impression,  I also devoured Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. My brother and I, without TV, movies or neighborhood kids, spent hours creating world and characters with our hand me down action figures, Barbie Dolls, stuffed animals. We had story lines that lasted for years.

And it was there that it became clear to be the biological sex assigned to me was the wrong one. I identified almost always only with the female protagonists in the books I read. I loved playing the female characters more than the male. When I found myself at home along, I began regularly dressing up in my mom's clothes, trying on her jewelry.

I got oh so close to an artist's life in middle school. My prepubescent voice landed me in chorus. There, I was cast in the HMS Pinafore. I absolutely loved it. But I was moved to yet another school, this time a private school. I hated the school but found I knack for creative writing. And desperately tried to get into the theater program.

But I was rejected. It crushed me and I put that dream away. Parents and teachers pushed me hard to math, science and sports. I did enjoy sports when it was play. I hated it as serious effort and dropped out of youth football and other leagues, usually after one week on the team.

And then we move back to Johannesburg, South Africa in 1980, during the height of apartheid. It was a traumatic move for many reasons. I was born there, lived there until I was 6 and we had emigrated to the States via cruise ship and Ellis Island. Supposedly for good. I started rebelling, making friends with people outside of religious cult.

I started sneaking away to watch more movies, listened to my first rock music and spent as much time out of the house as possible. But I still did not know that film directors existed. Then a funny thing happened. Late in high school, very unsure of what to do and feeling very adrift and fragmented with my one true being a closeted gay female classmate, I went to see "The Right Stuff", Phillip Kaufman's epic tale of the Mercury Astronauts. 

It thrilled like nothing else did and for reasons I did not understand. My young, still very sheltered brain assumed I obviously wanted to be an astronaut still. It was the first serious, adult film I had ever seen. I failed to see it was the film and filmmaking that was speaking to me, not life as an astronaut.

But I had a severe coming of age of about apartheid South Africa after several power, violent episodes where I witnessed directly police brutality, ending up with actual blood on my hands and clothes. I was desperate to find some way to escape. My mom was still keen to see attend the Naval Academy as she had befriend the US Naval Attache, but I loathed the idea as I knew I was pacifist and my inner self knew it was the last place for someone who was actually woman.

So I convinced here to instead let me get an NROTC scholarship to go to MIT as that seemed like the most non-military way to become a test pilot (The Right Stuff) and become an astronaut. I applied on my own, was accepted. My mom "failed" to get my NROTC paperwork done and my parents informed me they only had saved $1000 for me to go to college, enough for one-way air ticket to the USA.

I was crushed but running out of time as the South African government was confiscating the passports of dual citizens like myself. I was staring a life of either military service fighting in Angola and the whispers of terrible atrocities reached my ears -- or serving in the South African Military Police and like shooting protesters. So I grudgingly accepted the Naval Academy, passed the rigorous tests. At the last hour, the South African government offered me a free university education plus a health stipend plus a guaranteed job for life on graduating. But it reeked of evil. Years later, I found it was a recruiter for the apartheid government's nuclear bomb program because I had expressed an interest in studying nuclear fusion at MIT (for rocket engines).

I bought my round-trip ticket to the US and lied to the military customs that I was visiting family and would return in a week. The walk to the plane to leave South Africa was truly terrifying. But I was very fortunate, I boarded the plane and escaped without incident. 

The Naval Academy was a nightmare. I dreaded going and from day one, I hated it. And it got worse every day. But I was determined to not let anyway say I washed out. I gritted through the brutal plebe summer, drilled by Marine Drill instructors from Quantico. I excelled at piloting boats, marksmanship and every task thrown my way. Except boxing. I refused to box and strike another person. And I loathed being in a world of men, a world of testosterone. 

The first day of academic classes, shortly after becoming a full cadet, I quit. I've never, ever regretted that. But at that point I was truly lost. My parents marriage has split during that summer, my mom, brother and sister has returned to the US while my dad moved to Swaziland. I went to my mom's in Knoxville TN. 

She pulled strings to get me into the University of Tennessee. I agreed only if I could major in electronic music as the only possession I really love was my Korg synth I had bought in high school with my first job. But I lasted only a few days in college as I was not musically talented or experienced. 

I ran away on a Greyhound bus to go to California to get a job as photographer and play music. I could not find work or a place to live. I ended up penniless in Washington DC and fortunately found a high school friend where I stayed for weeks. 

I went back to Knoxville where my dad had come fearing for my life. Unfortunately for my parents, it did not reunite them. And I had no idea what to do. I was completely, utterly lost without friends or directions.

But in that fall of 1984 into 1985, as I moved from age 17 to age 18, everything changed. I still had a student ID for UT, so I went to the library as you could rent and watch movies on these tiny 13" TVs for free. I had SO many movies to catch up on. My mom had left the Two-by-Two's as I had. 

I also started seriously playing Dungeon's and Dragon's which I had started in high school but never got too serious. My brother and two friends, we started a party and we started playing every week, often all weekend.

One day I rented a movie about space and astronauts. I had never heard of it but it looked interesting. It gripped me, far more than The Right Stuff, far more than anything every had in my life. The film was "2001: A Space Odyssey" and in a sudden burst of revelation, it was absolutely clear to me that people made films. That I could be a filmmaker. That I did not have choose an interest in life, I could make movies about whatever interested me. Film = me, me = film.

It was not long after that I was rolling twenty-sided die to create my first serious D&D character. Of course, it was a woman. And I instantly knew who this woman was. She was angry, she was misunderstood, she had been mistreated and misjudged and was bent on righting the wrongs of her male dominated, ultra religious world, wreaking vengeful justice on anyone who opposed her, no matter the cost.

Her name, of course, was Srace Xiveren. Srace  = me, me = Srace.

So Srace Films is the full alpha and omega circle of my life. It took me until my mid-50's to finally come out to the world as the person I've always known myself to be. Happily, this Srace is not quite as angry, no longer vengeful. But I am stronger, wiser, much more battle-scarred (literally from multiple surgeries and traumas).

As many have said, you don't want to be a filmmaker. It's too hard, too risky, to fraught with perils. You are called to it. And for me, these callings - to film and to the feminine are one and the same. Srace = woman = me = film = Srace Films