WHO WE ARE
“Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.”
- Annie Dillard
As filmmakers, we enjoy the gift of creating wonder as an abundant and celebrated resource for all people.
portrait by Beth Mickalonis, 2022
Pilar Timpane is the lead filmmaker and producer of Teacup Productions based in Durham, NC. Her work has focused on documenting community-led change, with an emphasis on the leadership of women, Latin America, and religious experience. She works on independent films, commissions, collaborations, and personal projects. She also writes and consults on documentaries and grants.
Pilar was a 2022-23 ITVS/NEH Humanities Documentary Development Fellow and a Logan Nonfiction Program Fellow. She recently co-directed and produced the short documentary MAKING WAVES (co-dir. by Victoria Bouloubasis, 2022) in partnership with Visit NC. Her short SANTUARIO (2019, PBS/ReelSouth & AlJazeera Witness, co-dir Christine Delp) was the winner of the Best Documentary Short Jury Prize at New Orleans Film Festival 2018 as well as the Crested Butte ActNow Award and the IF/Then Shorts American South Pitch. Her work has shown widely at film festivals including Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, RiverRun International, and Hamptons International Film Festival. She is an alumna of the Women in Film Finishing Fund, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Southern Documentary Fund, Working Films. She was a 2020 fellow with the New Orleans Film Society Southern Producers Lab Fellow. She was named a 2021 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist by the Durham Arts Council. She's a published writer with bylines at The Revealer, Sojourners, and AlJazeera.
Currently, she is directing her first feature film. Untitled Catholic Women Documentary is a feature film in production produced by Christine Delp and co-produced by Andrea Patiño Contreras.
She has been invited to speak on panels to discuss ethics in documentary film, sanctuary, and social change (Sundance Film Festival 2019, SXSW 2019, Allied Media Conference 2018, Skidmore College MDOCS Storytellers Forum 2018, ASAP/10 2018).
As a production service, Teacup provides video and photography, film editing, consultation and producing expertise for film and television projects, as well as like-minded independent clients. Clients include universities, non-profits, faith groups, and arts organizations.
She is the producer of the lyrical documentary "The Last Partera," which follows the final years of a 100 year old midwife in rural Costa Rica (dir. Victoria Bouloubasis and Ned Phillips). This feature film premiered at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April, 2025.
She graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers University in 2009. She received a Masters degree magna cum laude from Duke University Divinity School in 2013, with a thesis in photographic ethics.
J’sha Gift is a producer at Teacup. She is an award-winning filmmaker whose work centers on empathetic, character-driven storytelling. Rooted in her Afro-Caribbean and African American heritage, she creates branded documentaries, biographical films, and commercial projects. She has worked globally as a DP on documentary and branded projects and contributed to an Oscar-shortlisted social media campaign.
A 2023 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Gift has made films such as Echoes Unheard, which earned selections at several festivals nationwide and won Best Short Documentary at the 2024 NC Black Film Festival. Her work has been featured in the Carter-Tinson Art Gallery at UNC-Chapel Hill and has taken her as far as the Galápagos Islands. She is based in North Carolina and continues to work on scripted and unscripted projects that tell stories of impact.
Ana Hoppert Flores is a producer at Teacup. Her first involvement with Teacup was as production assistant on “Making Waves: the Cocoa Cinnamon Story,” which screened at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2022.
Hoppert Flores is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied English and Communications with a focus in Media Production. As co-president of the Carolina Film Association, she established the group’s first equipment check-out system, widening student access to film equipment on UNC’s campus, and co-led the programming of the group’s First Annual Film Festival of twenty student films, drawing over 250 people in attendance. She was also an editor for Aspect, Carolina’s student-led academic journal focusing on screen-based media.
“Abuela,” a short narrative film which she co-created for her capstone at UNC Chapel Hill, received the 2024 Latin American Communities Prize at Longleaf Film Festival. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Film & Media Production program at UT Austin.
Original photo of my mother Maria-Christina Keller courtesy of
Patricia Klindienst