About Us
Two histories, one people, one camera.
Tenneka Studios was founded to answer a question that kept coming up at family reunions: why is none of this in the movies?
Black American Indian history is not a footnote to two other stories. It is its own continuous line — maroon settlements in Spanish Florida, Freedmen citizens of the Five Tribes, stomp grounds and ring shouts that never stopped, families whose names appear on two sets of rolls and in neither textbook.
We work small and slow. A cinematographer, a sound recordist, a genealogist, and whoever the community sends to sit with us. We shoot on location, we score with living musicians, and we release directly to the people who care most — no gatekeeper deciding which histories stay in the catalog.
Our first feature, The Unconquered, arrives in 2026. Everything we make after it will follow the same rule: get it right, then make it beautiful.
Filmed with, not about
Every production begins with consent protocols written alongside the families and ceremony keepers on screen. Nothing is recorded that a community has asked us to keep closed.
Archive first
Allotment records, church ledgers, tintypes, cassette interviews. We digitize what families hold and return copies to every household that lends us their history.
Cinema, not a lecture
Wide anamorphic frames, live score, and patient hands. History buffs get the citations; movie goers get a film that moves.