Chukumba is one of those fathers who learned to be afraid for his son before learning not to give up.
It all began in 2023, when Luchina Fisher filmed them on a camping trip where, amid campfires and long silences, they talked about what almost no one dares to say out loud: the fear that the world might harm a child simply for being who they are. That short film won an Emmy, Netflix bought it, and two years later, in 2025, the same fathers reunited for another trip, this time in a country where laws against trans families had grown even more restrictive.
Those two trips gave rise to ‘The Dads,’ the documentary that premiered this year at the SXSW festival in Austin. Five of those fathers did not stop with the film: they founded ‘The Dads Foundation,’ an organization that continues to organize camps and defend the rights of their families. Fisher sums it up this way: what they are living through today is ‘another level we had never seen before.’ And even so, they keep showing up, with a camera between them, willing to let their love be seen.