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In 2017, when Moonlight won Best Picture at the Academy Awards — after the most surreal envelope catastrophe in Oscar history — the cameras found a group of people weeping and clutching each other on stage. The story that dominated the next morning’s coverage was about Barry Jenkins, the soft-spoken director from Liberty City who had turned a story about growing up Black and queer in Miami into one of the most celebrated American films in decades. That story was entirely real. But folded inside it was a stranger, longer, more improbable one — the story of how a guerrilla film collective called Borscht Corp spent a decade constructing, almost from nothing, the cultural infrastructure that made a film like Moonlight thinkable. Not just possible. Thinkable.
Understanding what the Borscht Corp Miami film collective accomplished requires understanding the void it filled.
Before Borscht: Miami's Missing Film Culture (Pre-2004)
By the early 2000s, Miami-Dade County was, on paper, one of the busiest production centers in the United States. Roughly 3,000 film production companies operated in the region. The local industry generated an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue. Crews shot Miami Vice, Bad Boys, CSI: Miami, and an endless stream of music videos and commercials against the city’s photogenic skyline. Sound stages were booked. Location scouts knew every pastel facade in South Beach by heart.
And yet the city produced virtually nothing of its own. Miami functioned as a set — a warm, visually cooperative service economy for stories conceived in Los Angeles and New York. The cameras arrived, used the palm trees and the ocean light, and left. There was no independent filmmaking community, no pipeline for developing local directors, no institution committed to discovering what a Miami film might actually look like if someone from Miami made it.
Billions of dollars circulated through the local production economy without producing a single film that grappled with the city’s actual texture — its Haitian communities in Little Haiti, its Cuban exile families in Hialeah, its Black neighborhoods in Liberty City and Overtown, its overwhelming strangeness and beauty and violence. The industry treated Miami like a postcard. Nobody was trying to make it a sentence.
2004–2010: Foundation and the Knight Arts Challenge
Borscht Corp began the way many consequential things begin: with young people who hadn’t yet learned what was supposed to be impossible. Lucas Leyva co-founded the collective while still a student at New World School of the Arts, Miami’s public performing arts magnet high school. Alongside early collaborators like Jillian Mayer — who would later establish herself as a nationally recognized multimedia artist — Leyva started organizing screenings, making short films, and articulating something that sounded grandiose but was actually quite specific: Miami needed its own film identity. Not a franchise. Not a brand. An identity — a set of aesthetic instincts and narrative obsessions rooted in what the city actually was.
The early years were scrappy and hyperlocal. Borscht screened work in unconventional venues, staged events that blurred the line between film exhibition and performance art, and cultivated an aesthetic drawn from Miami’s particular psychic frequency — its subtropical surrealism, its layered diasporic cultures, its simultaneous glamour and decay.
The inflection point arrived in 2010. Borscht won a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant, part of the Knight Foundation’s broader investment in Miami’s cultural infrastructure. The grant was transformative — not because it made Borscht wealthy, but because it allowed the collective to professionalize without losing its identity. The Knight Foundation Miami film funding enabled Borscht to commission more short films, pay filmmakers actual money, and expand its annual festival into something with genuine institutional ambition behind it.
More importantly, the grant validated the thesis. The idea that Miami independent filmmaking could be a real, sustained creative practice — not just a contradiction in terms — now had institutional backing. Someone with resources had looked at what Leyva and his collaborators were building and decided it was worth betting on.
The Festival as World-Building: Borscht's Radical Exhibition Model
A conventional film festival would have been useful. Borscht built something far more disorienting and effective. Each edition of the Borscht festival functioned less as a screening series and more as an immersive, site-specific performance piece designed to rewire how attendees understood their own city.
The details have become semi-legendary in independent film circles. One edition dispatched audiences on kayak armadas through Biscayne Bay to reach a screening location accessible only by water. Another staged a coffin burial in the Everglades as part of its programming. There was the Coral Orgy — an edition that wove marine biology, eroticism, and ecological anxiety into a fever-dream festival experience that defied any conventional genre category. Every curatorial decision communicated a single, relentless argument: Miami is not the city you think it is. It is stranger, richer, more cinematically alive than any postcard or cop show has ever suggested. Pay attention.
National critics did. The Borscht Miami film festival earned a reputation that the writer and programmer Brett Kashmere captured in a phrase that stuck: “Sundance on psychotropic mushrooms.” Coverage in Filmmaker Magazine, Indiewire, and major arts publications framed Borscht not as a charming regional oddity but as one of the most vital incubators for short-form cinema anywhere in the country. The festival gave Miami filmmakers something they had never had before — a reason to stay. An audience that understood what they were trying to do. A context in which their work made sense.
The Moonlight Origin Story: From Chlorophyl to the Academy Awards
The path from Borscht Corp to the Academy Awards runs through Andrew Hevia, and it runs through a deliberate, years-long effort to bring Barry Jenkins back to Miami.
Hevia, who became one of Borscht’s core members and most active producers, had attended Florida State University’s celebrated film school. When he returned to Miami, he brought with him a network of FSU-trained filmmakers and a conviction that shaped everything that followed: the most important thing the collective could do was connect Miami-born talent with the city they’d come from.
Barry Jenkins had grown up in Liberty City, one of Miami’s most underserved neighborhoods. He’d left for FSU, made his striking debut feature Medicine for Melancholy in San Francisco in 2008, and then entered a period of creative limbo — navigating an industry largely indifferent to the intimate, formally ambitious stories he wanted to tell. Hollywood didn’t know what to do with Jenkins. Hevia and the Borscht network did.
The connection that ultimately produced Moonlight was catalyzed through the Borscht ecosystem. Tarell Alvin McCraney, a MacArthur Fellowship-winning playwright who had also grown up in Liberty City, had written an unpublished semi-autobiographical piece called In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. McCraney and Jenkins had grown up in the same neighborhood without ever knowing each other as kids. McCraney’s script reached Jenkins through the intimate network of relationships that Borscht had spent years cultivating — the connective tissue of a local creative community that simply hadn’t existed before the collective built it.
Jenkins adapted the play into a screenplay. Hevia came on as a producer. The Moonlight Miami production drew on the local knowledge, neighborhood relationships, and community trust that the Borscht infrastructure had established over the previous decade. Liberty City filming for Moonlight wasn’t an extractive process — outsiders parachuting in to use a poor neighborhood as scenery. It was a homecoming, facilitated by people who had spent years earning the right to tell stories in and about communities Hollywood had always ignored.
When Moonlight won Best Picture, the celebration that mattered most didn’t happen at the Dolby Theatre. It happened in Liberty City, where residents organized a block party on Oscar night — gathering on the same streets that appeared in the film to watch a story about their own lives claim the highest honor in American cinema. That kind of moment doesn’t happen by accident. It was the product of ten years of stubborn community-building.
The Borscht Diaspora: 13 Filmmaker Magazine "25 New Faces"
Moonlight was the most visible achievement to emerge from the Borscht ecosystem. It was not remotely the only one.
By the mid-2020s, the collective’s alumni record had grown almost comically impressive. Thirteen filmmakers who passed through Borscht were named to Filmmaker Magazine‘s annual “25 New Faces of Independent Film” list — widely considered the single most important emerging-talent survey in American cinema. More than twenty Borscht-affiliated short films screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Ten were acquired by the Criterion Channel, placing work by Miami filmmakers alongside the canonical films of world cinema.
These numbers describe something more significant than a hot streak. They describe a pipeline. Borscht didn’t produce one outlier success through luck or timing. It systematically developed talent, provided production resources, created exhibition platforms, and offered filmmakers the one thing Miami had never given its artists before: a reason to believe that a career in cinema was possible without leaving.
Filmmakers like Jillian Mayer, Terence Nance, and others from the Borscht orbit built careers spanning features, gallery work, television, and digital media. The diaspora spread nationally, but the creative sensibility remained recognizably Miami — humid, surreal, multilingual, uninterested in anyone’s expectations.
Borscht's Institutional Legacy: What It Built Beyond Itself
If you pressed Lucas Leyva or any of the Borscht principals on the collective’s most important achievement, the honest answer might not be a film or a filmmaker. It might be an audience.
Before Borscht, Miami simply did not have a substantial community of people who showed up to watch independent, locally produced cinema. That audience didn’t exist because no one had given it a reason to. By the time Borscht had operated for a decade — throwing its kayak screenings and Everglades burials and Coral Orgies — that audience was real, engaged, and hungry for more.
That audience became the foundation for the institutions that followed. O Cinema, Miami’s beloved independent movie theater, found a public already primed by years of Borscht programming to seek out adventurous work. FilmGate Miami, an interactive media festival, grew from the community-driven exhibition model that Borscht had pioneered. Third Horizon, a Caribbean film festival founded by filmmaker Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, drew on the networks Borscht had cultivated, extending the vision into diasporic Caribbean cinema.
None of these institutions are Borscht. None owe their entire existence to the collective. But all of them grew in ground that Borscht broke. The collective demonstrated a lesson that reverberates through every Miami film festival, screening series, and production company that followed: a city’s film culture is not something that arrives from outside. It is not bestowed by an industry or imported from a coastal capital. It is built, stubbornly and deliberately, from within. It requires years of work that doesn’t pay, institutional funders brave enough to back unproven models, and a core group of artists unreasonable enough to keep going when every rational incentive pointed toward leaving.
Miami independent filmmaking is now a phrase that means something — that carries specific aesthetic, cultural, and institutional associations. That phrase exists in large part because a group of people decided, while some of them were still in high school, that it should. The infrastructure Borscht Corp built didn’t just produce Moonlight. It produced the conditions under which a film like Moonlight could be imagined, written, financed, filmed on location in Liberty City, and celebrated by the very community whose story it told. That isn’t a film credit. It’s a cultural transformation, and it started with kayaks.
