Night Moth is a mixed-reality coming-of-age documentary about Danielle Webber, who, at 16, was incarcerated for four years in a New York State maximum juvenile detention center, and the avatar world she created with her mentor to help her survive.

Blending animated world-building with cinéma vérité, Night Moth documents her intimate story while excavating the subtle ways the system trapped her. The short film also follows her life after incarceration as she navigates being on parole while pregnant at the age of twenty.

To offer a new perspective on innocence and the rebirth of a human spirit, Night Moth investigates how issues of class, drugs, neglect, and domestic violence put the vulnerable on a lost path through the system.

Danielle grew up as the youngest of fourteen kids in a home and community struggling with addiction. Her hometown Gowanda, NY, is facing a staggering percentage of opioid emergencies and deaths. 

During her adolescence, she constantly skipped school to avoid being bullied by her peers who ostracized her because of her family’s reputation. At age 13 she attempted to run away from home, and, as a result, she was put on PINS – Persons In Need of Supervision – and had to wear an ankle monitor. At age 15 she was sentenced to four years in a maximum secure center for juveniles.

During her incarceration, which was one of the longest sentences any person at the facility was serving, she met director Maggie Hazen and together they created Night Moth – a fictional, fantasy world centered around an avatar named Luna. In the documentary, Danielle and Luna are the same person moving seamlessly back and forth between Danielle’s real life and the world she created through mixed reality and motion capture.

On February 17, 2023, Danielle was released and Maggie has been filming her journey through vérité style filmmaking, on-camera interviews, and Danielle’s personal phone videos and messages. 

Four months later in May of 2023 Danielle discovered she was pregnant.

Her parole officer said she can’t live with her family so she was forced to rent an apartment. Currently, Danielle doesn’t have work or the transportation needed to secure a job. She is currently facing eviction and looking for work to cover her rent before the baby is due on March 5, 2024. 

Maggie will continue to follow Danielle as she navigates her new life with a newborn amidst the stresses of financial insecurity.

Vérité scenes following Danielle after her incarceration will be juxtaposed with her animated avatar Luna – a young, powerful goddess through which Danielle narrates the fiction and reality of her personal story. Luna is from planet Neptune and has been banished by her parents to a prison on the moon.

Luna will stand in for parts of Danielle’s story we aren’t able to capture on camera such as her family background, the story of why she was incarcerated and her life within the juvenile detention center. These imagined characters will provide safety for Danielle to narrate some of the most sensitive parts of her personal history. Using a world building strategy through the avatar Luna has cultivated space for Danielle to exercise her personal agency to claim her own story while resisting the identity the system placed on her.

Through this fantasy, Luna also discovers two more characters, Seven and Neves, twin seven-legged octopi who represent the push and pull of Danielle’s subconscious as she maneuvers through the mental challenges of her post-incarcerated life.

The virtuous octopus Seven, helps Luna on the path toward personal freedom. Neves is the evil twin who seeks to imprison Luna through deception and bring her back to the home planet she has escaped from. This duality will represent the intergenerational trauma that Danielle yearns to break free from while she also falls into some of the same patterns of her upbringing.

In Danielle’s own words, “Seven and Neves represent the good and the bad in life. There is always something good that is happening but the bad always comes. The bad is usually demented and brought on by misunderstanding and trauma.”

In 2019, director Maggie Hazen founded the Columbia Collective with six incarcerated young artists at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls in the Hudson Valley. The Collective is a multimedia arts group of young female and trans justice-impacted artists narrating their own histories in a system where offense defines identity.

Through her work with Columbia Collective, Maggie has unprecedented videos of young people who are incarcerated in the The Columbia Secure and Brookwood Secure Centers for Youth. They wear augmented reality face masks to abide by state confidentiality laws and augmented voices to hide their identity. These videos are a rare permitted artifact of an unseen world that will be used throughout the documentary to show the lives of these incarcerated young people alongside Danielle’s unfolding narrative.

I began a personal journey and friendship with Daneille in 2019 while she was incarcerated and have been investigating the ways her story connects to the prison industrial complex as a whole: a tentacular force of violence and obscurity that permeates and structures contemporary life, yet remains challenging to visualize and pin down.

Through five years of first-hand experience building artist run collaboratives inside various New York State prison facilities, I have learned that, more often than not, the person we label a criminal has also been a victim. The rules and laws set up to “correct” someone end up trapping them in a game that can’t be won. By working with young people in the system, I have sought to disrupt this narrative and open up a path for individual expression and agency that isn’t defined by an institution.

I am also a fine artist and move between experimental video and sculpture in my work, often using mixed-reality as a framework to navigate the violent realities embedded in our institutional systems of power. In the past, I have invented alternative realities through my work to literally and figuratively disarm these systems through image, objects and play. This documentary will explore a similar style and method.

Artwork: maggiehazen.com

Following four years of working with Danielle while incarcerated, Maggie and her team have continued to film Danielle as she tries to reintegrate into her life while pregnant and on parole. The team will be following Danielle’s story as she gives birth and becomes a mother. 

The alter-ego of Luna is in its early stages and Maggie is eager to collaborate with seasoned animators to design and create the visual elements of this animated world that will be a large part of the film.

Prior to filming with Danielle, Maggie worked with her and other young adults at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls to create meta-narratives about their incarcerated lives and has been filming and following their stories post incarceration.