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Human-centered storytelling
We focus on lived experience, real people, and the emotional realities behind public perception, policy, exclusion, and social stigma.
Metamora Films is an independent social-impact media company focused on criminal justice, stigma, second chances, and the human stories too often reduced to labels.
We develop documentary films, educational media, screenings, and special projects that create conversation, build understanding, and invite audiences to see people and complex issues with greater depth.
Stories That Change Hearts and Minds.
Criminal justice • social impact • lived experience
The Forgiveness Journey reflects the human-centered storytelling at the heart of Metamora Films.
Stories That Change Hearts and Minds
Metamora Films creates documentary and social-impact media that helps audiences move beyond assumptions and see the human stories behind stigma, hardship, and lived experience.
Many conversations around incarceration, reentry, social stigma, housing instability, and second chances are shaped by fear, distance, or incomplete understanding. People can become reduced to labels instead of being understood as individuals with history, complexity, relationships, and the capacity to change.
Metamora Films exists to challenge that pattern. Through documentary storytelling, interviews, screenings, and mission-driven media, we create work that invites deeper reflection and more meaningful conversation.
Our goal is not simply to explain an issue. It is to help audiences connect with the people living inside it.
We focus on lived experience, real people, and the emotional realities behind public perception, policy, exclusion, and social stigma.
Our work is designed to support education, advocacy, community engagement, screenings, and thoughtful public dialogue.
We want audiences to leave with a deeper understanding of the people and experiences at the center of the story.
Metamora Films has spent more than a decade creating independent documentary and social-impact work centered on people, justice, lived experience, and the stories that often sit outside the mainstream frame.
Earlier Metamora Films projects explored forgiveness, incarceration, social stigma, family impact, housing barriers, and the complicated process of rebuilding after hardship.
The work included documentary production, community screenings, public conversations, event coverage, and independent projects developed around stories that deserved more attention.
Active production slowed for a long period as life outside filmmaking demanded more attention. Those years brought rebuilding, instability, setbacks, and a deeper understanding of what it means to move forward while the past continues to influence how a person is seen.
That experience did not move Metamora Films away from its original purpose. Instead, it brought greater clarity to the stories the company wants to tell now.
Today, Metamora Films is beginning a new chapter from the Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington area, with a renewed focus on criminal justice storytelling, social stigma, second chances, lived experience, and documentary work that can help people see one another differently.
The geography is new. The purpose is not.
Matt Duhamel is a filmmaker, producer, and former television news and radio personality who turned his attention toward helping others through the power of independent film and media.
His work is grounded in the belief that film can help individuals, communities, and society by increasing compassion, tolerance, understanding, and forgiveness. That idea has shaped Metamora Films from its earliest projects through its renewed focus today.
Matt has directed and produced five films, including the award-winning short narrative Last Day with Lizzy , a symbolic story inspired by his daughter, Maddie. His work has also explored incarceration, housing barriers, forgiveness, stigma, second chances, and the human consequences of the criminal justice system.
His perspective has also been shaped by lived experience. Personal experience with incarceration, rebuilding, instability, and the lasting effects of social stigma has deepened the way he approaches stories about identity, belonging, justice, and what it means to move forward after the past has already shaped how others see you.
FOUNDER'S PERSPECTIVE“Social stigma can become its own sentence. Storytelling can challenge it.”
Matt is now based in the Pacific Northwest region, where Metamora Films is entering a new chapter of active production with a focus on documentary storytelling, criminal justice, social stigma, lived experience, second chances, and stories capable of changing perspective.
Metamora Films develops documentary and social-impact projects around the needs of the story, the audience, and the organization behind it.
That can mean a documentary film, educational media, screenings, institutional use, podcast or video storytelling, or a special project designed for a specific community or purpose.
Interviews, field production, story development, editing, and documentary projects built around real people and meaningful subject matter.
Metamora Films specializes in work connected to criminal justice, stigma, reentry, second chances, lived experience, and the human realities behind complex social issues.
Projects can support community screenings, schools, universities, nonprofits, organizations, conferences, facilitated conversations, and other educational settings.
Metamora Films can also support educational distribution, institutional licensing, collaborative media projects, special productions, and other story-driven work that does not fit neatly into a traditional documentary format.
Tell us what you are working on, who the audience is, and what you want the project to accomplish.