After filming her 2024 feature documentary Bloom, which explores the American hospital system and the birth workers striving to make reproductive care safer and more accessible, EMU professor and documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Miller-Derstine began searching for her next project. “I was looking for something lighter,” she said. “I wanted to show people sharing in collective joy together.”
That’s when the former Durham, North Carolina, resident stumbled onto the annual Beaver Queen Pageant, “a wildly campy, dam-important celebration of queer joy, eco-love, and over-the-top critter cosplay” held in the city for the past two decades. The raucous, homegrown drag competition, with its blend of high drama and low stakes, proved to be the perfect subject for the filmmaker, who joined EMU’s Visual and Communication Arts (VACA) Department this year as assistant professor of digital media.
Her latest film, the heartwarming and quirky Once Upon a Wetland (2025), won “Best Documentary Short” at BEYOND: The Cary Film Festival (North Carolina) in mid-September, where it competed against short films from around the world. The 15-minute documentary follows first-time contestants Madam Bitey White, a charismatic performer and trivia host, and 16-year-old Ginger Bite-Dis, the youngest competitor, as they prepare for and compete in the 2023 Beaver Queen Pageant. The film offers a playful and poignant look at how local traditions provide space for defiance, connection, and collective care during a time of looming anti-LGBTQ legislation and tightening drag restrictions.
“This is a film that highlights joy,” said Miller-Derstine. “It’s about the hope we find when we gather together.”
| Why beavers? The first Beaver Queen Pageant was held in April 2005 to celebrate a successful community effort by the Duke Park neighborhood in Durham to stop the North Carolina Department of Transportation from eradicating a den of beavers that had taken up residence in the wetlands north of Interstate 85, according to the pageant’s website. The annual event is a fundraiser for local nonprofit organizations, including the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. |
The pageant’s castorine contestants take on beaver personalities, introduce themselves in their handcrafted “wetlands-ready wear,” showcase unique talents, and participate in interviews in their finest evening wear. The website notes that Beav Aldrin, the 2015 Queen, performed an aerial routine on silks, while the 2012 Queen, Furrah Gnawsett-Major, played the Star Wars theme on clarinet while hula-hooping.
The documentary was shown during a weeklong theatrical run at New York City’s Firehouse Cinema in May as part of DCTV’s “Road to the Oscars” Academy-qualifying initiative, which makes it eligible for consideration and potential nomination in the Academy Awards’ “Best Documentary Short Film” category.
It will be screened at the Red Rose Film Festival in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the weekend of Nov. 7, and the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, North Carolina, the weekend of Nov. 21. Although the film isn’t currently available to watch outside of film festivals, Miller-Derstine said she’s seeking an online distributor to stream the film.
Once Upon a Wetland was directed by Miller-Derstine, produced by her and Ian Robertson Kibbe, and edited by Ace McColl.
About the professor
Miller-Derstine grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and moved to Lancaster at age nine. She graduated from Goshen College in 2016 with a BA in communication (film concentration) and English writing, and earned an MFA in documentary film from Wake Forest University in 2023.
She served as multimedia producer for Mennonite Central Committee from 2016 to 2021, and spent the past year as an adjunct professor in filmmaking at Davidson College. The Mennonite-raised filmmaker said she had “heard through the grapevine” that longtime VACA Professor Jerry Holsopple would retire at the end of the 2024-25 academic year and jumped at the opportunity when the job opened. Now in her second month on EMU’s faculty, she said she’s found a welcoming community to call home.
“I love EMU,” she said. “I fully appreciate that we have a Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and that the university’s priorities are rooted in values of community, peace, and the greater social good.”
Miller-Derstine approaches all her work with a deep commitment to ethical storytelling and an awareness of the extractive history of the documentary field. She has won multiple awards for her films, including Best Director for her documentary short Welcome to the Dollhouse (2020) at both the Atlanta DocuFest and Hoosier Films Festival, and Best Documentary at the LongLeaf Film Festival for her feature documentary Bloom (2024).
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