🎬 For a limited time, female and 1st Generation Director Julianna Piechoczek has made her award-winning short films available to watch FREE on Vimeo! 🍿✨

If you’ve ever wanted to see her work as a writer/director, now’s your chance.

🎥 Watch here:

https://vimeo.com/juliannapitt

DANUBE DAUGHTER is my first feature film: an Arthouse female-led Psychological folk Thriller set in Budapest and the Hungarian countryside.

After several award-winning short films, I am stepping into my first feature with a story that feels deeply personal, urgent, and necessary. The film was born from questions I could not stop asking: What happens when a woman can no longer trust her own body? What does fear do when it has nowhere to go? And what old knowledge survives in women when doctors, husbands, churches, and governments fail them? This film is a pioneering exploration of the modern day Madonna-Whore complex, and its affect on the female psyche.

The film follows Julia, an American woman who arrives in Budapest after a violent psychological break, believing she may be pregnant. Alone in a foreign city, she begins receiving impossible phone calls from her absent husband, hearing a baby no one else can hear, and feeling the city itself close in around her. When an old friend leads her into the Hungarian countryside, folklore, female friendship, abortion, possession, and madness begin to blur.

This is a story about pregnancy panic, marriage, hallucination, folklore, and the terrifying space between wanting help and being consumed by it.

Visually, DANUBE DAUGHTER is intimate, strange, and atmospheric. Budapest is not treated like a postcard. It becomes an antagonist: beautiful, decaying, ancient, and alive. The film moves from oppressive apartment rooms, to haunted city streets, to the exposed openness of the countryside, where freedom begins to feel like danger.

Our team is lean, resourceful, and built around a strong creative group in Hungary. We have talented Hungarian actors, a visually ambitious production plan, deferred creative partners, and an experienced post-production team.

Our cinematographer is Csaba Szentgáli, who attended the prestigious Łódź Film School in Poland.

Our editor is Stephen Fletcher, whose credits include Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Amazon’s Voltron, and Netflix’s Three Body Problem. Stephen eats, sleeps, and breathes cinema, bringing a rare, encyclopedic command of film to the edit.

We've cast Jazmin Ferke to play Eszter the Shaman,

and Una Kovac to play the witch spirit that courses through the Danube River itself.

Our costumes are being created by six designers from Budapest’s STUDIO INFUSION, bringing a bold, handmade, art-driven vision to the world of the film.

The funds raised here are for production photography only. They will go directly toward paying crew, securing locations, lodging, meals, transportation, lighting, and safety needs on set. Post-production is not part of this raise.

We are unapologetically independent. This film is being made with urgency, belief, and the kind of creative resourcefulness that independent cinema was built on.

If you support women directors, first features, reproductive/autonomy stories, folk horror, psychological thrillers, or bold independent filmmaking, your support will help make DANUBE DAUGHTER possible.

Please consider contributing and sharing this campaign. Every donation helps us get this film in the can.

*Canva AI was used to generate the moving visualizations in the pitch video.