We recently connected with Faith Roden and have shared our conversation below.

Faith, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My creative portfolio is, overall, a mosiac of my personality, story, and self. Every project I work on, whether it’s one that is made by myself or someone else, is a reflection of my truest self. That includes all of the imperfections, mistakes I’ve made, and things I haven’t done. A lot of times, my creative works are my second chance.
I can’t pick a “favorite” project, or one that is more meaningful to an audience, but the project that is most meaningful to myself is my film “Always”. “Always” was written during one of my biggest heartbreaks and ultimately was the chapter in my life that transformed me into the person I am today. It led me to my life in Los Angeles. It’s a metamorphosis film, of sorts. I was nineteen, had just moved home after dropping out of my dream university in the middle of fall semester, and had broken up with the boy I’d been dating since the summer before freshman year. My life was in shambles. But “Always” is about more than that — that winter, while my life was falling apart, I found myself in this chasm between my childhood friends and growing up. My best friend and I parted ways that January. I thought, for a long time, he was the only person that would ever understand me. He felt like home for the majority of my teenage years, and some of my others, too. We’d known each other since we were three. We were family.
So when I sat down to write a script and realized all I could think about was finding myself but at the cost of my best friend, I thought “this has to be relatable, right?” The thing is, “Always” might be the worst project I have ever worked on. There were so many problems with casting, the acting doesn’t convey all of the emotion written in the pages, and unless you know my bond with my best friend, firsthand, the plot blurs a lot. Yet, it was a learning experience. It didn’t push me out of filmmaking, it pulled me in. It made me think that I have to try harder to get what I really want. So, I made up with my best friend, moved to Los Angeles, and rebuilt what really mattered to me. When I watch “Always”, I think of that. It’s a film that shows me growing up in real time.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

People tell me I’ve lived a lot of lives in my twenty years — which is mostly true. I’m a filmmaker, writer, student, aspiring teacher. Mostly, though, I’m a girl who was born and raised in small-town Wyoming. Something that’s unknown about Wyoming is the level of art, creativity, and passion that grows there. Art is encouraged everywhere in my home state.
That’s how I started out. I was twelve years old, and a man who recently started a youth film festival in our state visited our school. I went home and immediately started filming in my backyard. I’ll never forget driving down to the State’s capitol and getting to watch my film in a real, although small and historic, theater. That was the day I fell in love with it.
I entered into that youth competition until my junior year of high school, when I won Best Picture with my film “Pieces”. Cheyenne Youth Short Film Festival (CYSFF) was just the start, though. A few weeks later, in the middle of my world history class, I got a call. The man on the other end of the phone introduced himself as Rudi Womack, director of the Wyoming International Film Festival. He said, “I want to screen your film this summer”. I’ve never been so happy or surprised in my life.
Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to call Wyoming International Film Festival a home. I’ve gone consecutively the last four years, and in 2024 I won Best Wyoming Film alongside my friends, Isaac Larsen and Ty VanZanten (two competitors I met within CYSFF) with our film “In A Perfect World”. Rudi was really the first person to make me feel like more than just an ambitious kid. He made me feel like a filmmaker. His support and love for Wyoming filmmakers has pushed me to be the artist I am today.
Now, at twenty years old, I am working on my first feature-length film. I’ve studied creative writing, am currently pursuing a degree in Elementary Education, and live in Los Angeles to chase the dreams I began forming back home. Yet no matter where I go or what I create, I carry Wyoming with me. It is the place that built me first—my voice, my work ethic, my love for storytelling—and that’s not an attribute that can be changed about me. I’m still the small-town Wyoming girl in everything I do.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I’ve had to unlearn, or maybe one I’m still unlearning, is that something being meant for you means it’s the only possibility. If you would have asked me just over a year ago, I would have told you I was going to be living in Wyoming, working my way through college, becoming a teacher, and settling down with someone. I would have never thought that this year, I would be building a life for myself in Los Angeles.
The current film I am working on, my first feature-length film, is a story displaying that not everything works out in the way you expect. It explores the relationship of Esme and Phoenix, a couple in their mid-twenties, through different lifetimes as they attempt to navigate their relationship and answer the question of if they are “meant to be”. This story will envoke love in those who don’t believe in it, crush every hopeless romantic such as myself, and have every member in the audience thinking about how their past choices, desires, and regrets effect their present and future.
If I haven’t found the way to unlearn that there is only one path for me, I will have by the end of writing, watching, and adoring this movie.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My mission in my creative journey is simply to share as many stories as possible with the world. No matter the audience, who sees them, who loves or hates them, they are pieces of me that I know someone will find resonance in. Stories and the way you choose to tell them holds so much power. Anyone with an ounce of creativity in them has the world in their hands. I know that the way I choose to create can impact, connect, and transform the people that are touched by it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @faith.ember.r
• Other: https://youtu.be/hMAM_l2U32Q?si=srgs4R2wUdkLE3kX
  https://youtu.be/LL4_q4KZqQM?si=ZKGlzlxHLtZJoBWC

Image Credits

Cari Faye Antonovich