Sorry I'm So Sensitive is a 75-minute hybrid documentary that asks a question Austin has been living through in real time: when a city, a person, or a practice is constantly reinvented, is anything still left that resembles itself?

I'm Christina Parrish. I started doing stand-up in Austin at sixteen. Biking to open mics, joining a cult comedy theater, taking late-night buses home. At nineteen, my mother died by suicide; within hours I was working new material about it at an open mic. That pattern, metabolizing life into jokes in real time, became my career. Fifteen years of it.

This film documents my return. Not as a comeback story, as a personal question. Every set recorded for this film uses only untested material. No polished bits. No proven closers. What the audience watches, in real time, is the gap between writing a joke and finding out if it lands, stretched across three new hour-long sets, fifteen years of archive, and one city that has been reinventing itself for decades. The film closes at The Velveeta Room, where I started.

The film is built from three layers: fifteen years of archival performance footage and home video, three newly recorded hour-long stand-up sets, and cinematic narrative sequences shot across Crockett, Mesquite, and Austin. The archive isn't nostalgia, it's evidence. Who was this person, in this room, on this night? And is she the same person standing here now?

WHY WE'RE MAKING IT

No one has made this film before because the conditions for it are unusual: a filmmaker who is also the subject, who is also the performer, who is also the archivist of fifteen years of her own material. I wrote and starred in the award-winning feature 'Call Me Brother' (2018). I've performed on Austin stages since I was sixteen. The Austin Chronicle called me one of Austin's most compelling comics. This is the first project that connects all of it: stand-up, narrative filmmaking, and Texas, into a single voice.

I'm joined by an Austin team that knows this world from the inside: post-production producer Dan Hirons (founder of Hi-Post; SXSW, Slamdance, Emmy-nominated work on CNN's 'High Profits'), producer Dustin Svehlak (co-director of 'Funniest', which premiered at the 2016 Austin Film Festival, and a fifteen-year documentarian of the Austin comedy scene), and DP Erik Gatling.

The look draws from 'Tarnation', 'Aftersun', and 'Welcome to the Dollhouse'. These films that let humor and devastation share a frame without resolving the discomfort. Where the archival footage is degraded, we lean into the degradation. The new narrative footage is graded warm and faded, like the long drive through Davy Crockett National Forest, closer to memory than realism.

WHERE YOUR MONEY GOES

Most of this film already exists. Fifteen years of archival footage is captured and 80% assembled. All three new hour-long performances are shot. What your contribution funds is the gap between a nearly-assembled film and a finished, festival-ready feature:

Production: the Texas narrative shoot (~$3,800). A lean, four-day small-crew shoot this summer across Crockett, Mesquite, and Austin: the childhood locations, the school steps, the parking lots, the venues where I started. Present-tense scenes only, none of the hardest material is recreated onscreen.

Post-production (~$15,600):The biggest line item, and the heart of the work: an edit that braids fifteen years of archive with three new stand-up hours into the film's four-act structure, plus sound design (stand-up audio layered over Texas landscapes), final mix, and color.

Festival delivery (~$1,150): Captions, masters, DCP, and submission fees for the 2027 festival circuit.

Crowdfunding through Seed & Spark is one of three funding legs, alongside my own personal contribution (secured) and submission to grants for supporting funds. Every dollar here is finishing money, not starting money.

WHEN

- Summer 2026: Texas narrative shoot (Crockett, Mesquite, Austin)

- Fall-Winter 2026: Rough cut assembly

- End of year 2026: Fine cut, sound design, and mix

- January 2027: Color, captions, deliverables; picture lock

- Early 2027: Festival submissions: SXSW, Sundance, Tribeca, DOC NYC, True/False, Hot Docs, IDFA

- 2027-2028: Premiere, distribution, and screenings across Texas and the comedy community

WHY NOW

In a cultural moment where everyone is asked to constantly adapt, retrain, reinvent, and begin again, this film is a real-time investigation of what that actually costs, not as inspiration, but as documentation. It's for comedy audiences who know the texture of stand-up as a practice, and for anyone who has ever survived their own life by making something out of it.

Sensitivity, in this film, is not a soft quality. It's a discipline. It's what the work requires of me, and what the film, finally, asks of its audience.