Current Projects
Reflections Between
2026
This new short film explores themes of identity, aging, and the evolution of artistic voice. Drawing upon the nonlinear, layered approach that characterizes her experimental works, Burch integrates archival materials with contemporary footage to explore her creative desire across time and the shifting cultural forces that have shaped her life and work.
Both subject and observer, Burch examines the ways that honest self-reflection, as a queer, Black woman artist, is its own source of strength. Reflections Between honors the sensuality, humor, and hard-won wisdom that come from a lifetime of making art and, with any luck, evolving as a human being.
Through Her Eyes: The Legacy of Laurel Burch
2028
This hybrid, experimental documentary explores the legacy of Laurel Burch through the eyes of her daughter—a queer, mixed-race filmmaker defining her own creative identity—and reframes Laurel’s work for our times.
Blending rare historic footage, personal archives, and new material drawn from Laurel’s art work, the film reflects on what it meant to grow up in the orbit of an iconic, self-taught artist amid the shifting cultural landscape of the U.S. from the 1960s to today.
Tracing parallel creative paths across generations, it follows Laurel’s journey from struggling single mother selling handmade jewelry on the streets of San Francisco to a celebrated designer whose vibrant imagery of cats, horses, and goddess-like women has inspired millions worldwide. For Laurel, art was both refuge from the physical pain of her rare bone disease and a means of connection.
Aarin’s path, in turn, confronts the tension between honoring her mother’s visual language and claiming her own voice. It’s a story about love, distance, resilience and courage. The film reveals the emotional labor embedded in creative inheritance — the separation, return, and transformation that shape both art and identity.
At a time when so much about identity, truth, and representation are in question, Through Her Eyes offers an intimate meditation on legacy: on how we can both celebrate the gifts and face the challenges we inherit, and turn that reckoning into creative freedom.
Our History in Motion: A Queer San Francisco Story
TBA
This feature-length hybrid documentary is a love letter to legendary venues Club Q and The Box, exploring their pivotal role in the history of queer nightlife in San Francisco in the 1980s and 90s.
Through archival materials, original footage, interviews, and experimental visual techniques, Aarin Burch examines how these iconic spaces served as sanctuary, home, and sites of creation and connection.
Set against the backdrop of the Bay Area’s many demographic shifts, the documentary explores the clubs’ enduring impact and their significance for the queer community, celebrating “all the intersections that shaped who we were and who we became:” sexuality, race, and gender and belonging.