Growing up in rural Wales, Salvia (who was assigned male at birth), never had any exposure to fashion outside of music videos and movies. Everyone around her told her that expressing herself through fashion was “stupid, self-absorbed and unnecessary,” she says.

At 14, Salvia — who goes by that name on Instagram and doesn’t want to reveal her real name for privacy reasons — shaved off her eyebrows and then her hair. Now 18, Salvia wears extreme makeup and often uses prosthetics to create an otherworldly look in the photos she posts on her feed. It’s her way of subverting the idea of traditional beauty that she was once bullied for. She’s not alone. Salvia is among an increasing number of fashion influencers and drag performers worldwide who are posing the latest challenge to the straight-jacketing prevalent in the beauty industry by popularizing a less human-looking aesthetic, bordering on typical Hollywood depictions of aliens.

Why didn’t Marshawn Lynch, one of the best running backs in the NFL during the 2014 season, get the ball on second-and-goal from the half-yard line in Super Bowl XLIX? Was it a conscious choice on the Seahawks’ part — the offensive coordinator or head coach Pete Carroll, who was perhaps bent on “outcoaching” the Patriots’ Bill Belichick? Whatever play was called, certainly the Seahawks’ star quarterback, Russell Wilson, could have audibled and handed the ball off to Lynch. It didn’t happen, of course. Welcome to America.

Lynch: A History, the 94-minute documentary that I wrote, directed and produced, is more than just a celebration of the former Seahawks running back; the film shows how difficult his journey to a Hall of Fame–caliber career was and the unique way he went about the business of playing football — and dealing with the media — while being a Black man in America.

“It’s totally normal to talk about values on the first date,” says Leah Gottfried, a 28-year-old Modern Orthodox Jewish filmmaker. “There’s a literacy of values,” her husband, Isaiah Rothstein, pipes up. When he speaks, Gottfried squints and moves her face closer to listen: They respond, almost involuntarily, to each other’s movements. The couple, who married four days earlier, sit side-by-side at the kitchen table in their new Harlem apartment. Rain slides down the window overlooking a courtyard of snaking vines that makes the place feel far from the hustle and bustle of New York City.

Most Orthodox Jews date explicitly for the goal of marriage rather than for personal exploration, Gottfried says. Navigating this paradigm while chasing a film career supplied a gold mine of artistic fodder for a web series shedding light on a group that rarely gets screen time.