Meet The Team

Who We Are

JJ Lippman

Writer/Director

Los Angeles-based filmmaker JJ Lippman's work blends a striking visual aesthetic with sharp, character-driven narrative. She is especially drawn to thrillers and psychological dramas that blur the line between suspense and emotion. JJ, a 2024 graduate of the University of Southern California, has worked with numerous USC actors, filmmakers, and writers. Nevertheless, her voice and ambition have been most shaped by her independent endeavors.
She wrote, directed, sound-designed, and edited the short film Human Nature, which examines environmental destruction through the prism of a supernatural thriller. The narrative centers on a woman who trespasses on protected land and starts to experience nature's wrath. The film was nominated at Indie Short Fest and Malibu Film Festival, and went on to win awards at IndieX Film Festival, Nature Without Borders International Film Festival, IndieFEST Film Awards, and Cannes Independent Shorts.
Her next project, Echoes of Obsession, was created in a remote cabin with a crew of three people. What the project lacked in resources it made up for in intensity, earning recognition for its taut psychological storytelling. It won Best Thriller Short at the Hollywood Blood Horror Festival and screened at The Indie Horror Film Festival and Purgatory Film Festival.
In early 2024, JJ began developing her first feature film, Mind Games. Supported by a dedicated team of emerging filmmakers, this project brings together the themes that define her work: identity, obsession, and moral ambiguity and marks the beginning of a career committed to bold and emotionally charged storytelling.

Jordan Rice

Executive Producer

Jordan Rice is a New York-based producer and actor. While studying theater at the University of Southern California, Jordan co-Founded the production company 4085 Productions LLC, where he produced dozens of short films. Two of his short films, Breathe and Sore Throat, received festival recognitions and had a combined 15 official selections for festivals both domestically as well as internationally. During his senior year of college, he debuted the first feature film he produced, All Alone Together, which received 12 official selections and can now be streamed on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, and Roku TV. When he is not producing, Jordan is an auditioning musical theatre performer in New York City.

Director's Statement

Mind Games began with a question: what happens when someone trained to understand others loses all understanding of herself? The slow-burning fuse and emotional center of Mind Games is our protagonist, therapist Jules Abrams. Jules finds herself enmeshed in the lives of two new clients, Ava and Zander, whose relationship appears more lively, erratic, and vibrant than her own. Although their sessions start off professionally, she begins to subtly and dangerously insert herself.

I’m fascinated by characters who don’t fully understand their own motives. Jules doesn’t set out to manipulate or seduce. She wants to feel something. The choices she makes come from a place of deep emotional neglect and unacknowledged hunger. The world of Mind Games is quiet, middle-class suburbia: structured, tasteful, and slightly suffocating. The suburban setting is calm on the surface, but loaded with pressure: marital stagnation, emotional resentment, and unspoken disappointment. The therapy office, often portrayed as a place of insight and growth, becomes the film’s most charged and dangerous space. In these rooms, boundaries collapse. Fantasies blur with reality. Power shifts constantly. It is a film about control, emotional, sexual, psychological, and what happens when people try to control each other in order to feel less out of control themselves.

When I wrote Mind Games, I was interested in building a world that felt both familiar and claustrophobic: suburban spaces that are perfectly curated but deeply off. A marriage that looks functional from the outside but is rotting. My approach was to keep the drama grounded in realism, controlled performances, lived-in spaces, and naturalistic dialogue - while allowing for moments of heightened perspective. Jules imagines things she wishes were real. She lets fantasies bleed into facts. We stay with her, even when we begin to doubt her. I leaned into visual restraint, controlled framing, muted tones, careful pacing, and then allowed those elements to loosen as Jules does.

Directing this film meant leaning into tonal contradiction. It’s twisted, heightened, and deeply personal. And if it makes you laugh at something you probably shouldn’t, then I’ve done my job. The comedy in Mind Games is dark, dry, and character-driven. It comes from emotional repression, awkward power dynamics, and the absurdity of trying to stay composed while everything’s falling apart.

I wasn’t interested in telling a story where anyone is entirely good or bad; I was interested in discomfort, contradiction, and delusion. Mind Games is funny, tense, seductive, and cruel, just like the people in it.

- JJ Lippman