Episode
Kenny Riches
- Published
- Apr 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2578
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-truth-in-this-art-stories-that-matter-1372723/episodes/kenny-riches/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-truth-in-this-art-stories-that-matter-1372723/kenny-riches.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this episode of The Truth In This Art, the guest is Kenny Riches! Who is Kenny Riches: A Miami and Salt Lake City-based filmmaker born in Toyota City, Japan, whose award-winning features explore loneliness, identity, and human connection through intimate, character-driven narratives. With a BFA in Painting and Drawing and a filmography that includes The Strongest Man (Sundance premiere, 2015) and A Name Without A Place (2019), Kenny has received support from Sundance Institute, Knight Foundation, and PBS—and is co-founder of The Davey Foundation, a grant-giving organization for filmmakers. In our conversation, Kenny traces his journey from wanting to make films in the early 2000s when 16mm was still too expensive for a broke college student, to making skateboard videos with camcorders that evolved into short films alongside childhood friend and actor Patrick Fugit. He breaks down how Mouse —his fourth feature screening at Maryland Film Festival April 8–12 at the SNF Parkway Theatre and venues across Baltimore—emerged from pandemic isolation as a meditation on loneliness in the pre-social media early 2000s and a thriller about a lonesome first-generation person in ultra-white, ultra-religious Utah who gets tangled up in pen pal scams and petty theft. Kenny shares the bizarre real-life origin behind the film's scam storyline: a mysterious filmmaker friend he talked to for years without ever seeing his face, whose very existence his girlfriend suspected was an elaborate con—paranoia that bled straight into Mouse . He talks about directing his Japanese mother after convincing her a week before production (his pitch: we'll save money), the difference between Miami's endless weirdness through fresh eyes versus Utah's invisibility after a lifetime there, why he believes 90…