The Team
The people
making BREATHE.
Lead — Amara
Haven Everly
Haven Everly is a Filipino-American actress, singer, and creator based in Los Angeles whose roots could not be more fitting for this role. The daughter of professional singers from the Philippines who gave up their own dreams to build a life in the United States, Haven grew up understanding, from a very young age, what it means to carry something quietly.
She has appeared in Netflix's YOU, Showtime's The L Word, and led the Fil-Am feature The Girl Who Left Home, which traveled the festival circuit including the Seattle Asian American Film Festival.
Haven brings something rare to Amara: the ability to hold complexity without externalizing it, to make stillness do the work that noise never could.
Writer / Director
Brian Patrick Hoffman
Brian Hoffman is a New York-based filmmaker selected as a 2026 Emerging Artist at the American Pavilion at the Cannes International Film Festival. He is also a marketing executive whose entire career has been shaped by the power of storytelling and its ability to create genuine connection between people. He is a husband and father of four.
As someone who has carried anxiety quietly for years, he thinks about it not just for himself but for his children — determined that they never feel as alone in it as he sometimes did. BREATHE is his second film, and his most personal.
His debut short, A Matter of Time, is currently on the festival circuit and won Best Actress at the NY Shorts International Film Festival and Best Drama at the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival.
Director's Statement
"I've struggled with anxiety for most of my life. I'll never forget my first panic attack. I was completely blindsided — not by sadness, not by fear in any way I recognized, but by something that had no name."
"What I wanted, more than anything, was to see something and think: that's it. That's what it actually feels like."
"BREATHE is the film I wish I'd had."
— Brian Patrick Hoffman