COMING SOON…
RAINBOW GIRLS (2025)
Written & Directed by Nana Duffuor, Produced by Raman Nimmala
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.
FINALIST - Carol Dorothy Joyce Grant for Student Filmmakers AWARDEE - Columbia University Film Production Fund Grant
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
From the first time I heard of the Rainbow Girls, I was fascinated. Known for their bright colored hair and brazen tactics, “Rainbow Girls” was the moniker given to a loose band of Black trans and cisgender women in their late teens and early twenties, who launched a string of robberies of San Francisco’s most exclusive luxury brand stores in 2014.
I was living in the Bay Area at the time, when the influx of wealth from the tech industry spurred unprecedented levels of gentrification and displacement of longtime residents. Around that same time, a friend working in retail told me how employees were being trained to deal with these groups of young women swarming high-end stores like Gucci, Prada, and Burberry, then snatching as many items off the shelves as they could get their hands on before bolting.
As a former teenager with sticky fingers, and a lover of heist films like Bonnie & Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, and Set It Off, I was inspired. I imagined a story that centers around the friendship between three charismatic young 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 often denied.
In the midst of extreme social stratification, Rainbow Girls is a film that calls obedience into question, and is as much about transgression as it is about the need for belonging. Whether audience members find organized retail theft morally justifiable or morally repugnant, they will understand and see themselves in our main characters—Tati, Angel, and Gemini—and they will root for them. That’s my goal as a storyteller.
This project will serve as a proof-of-concept for the feature-length film, Rainbow Girls, centered around the same characters.