North Bay filmmakers Vince and Alia Beeton have been quietly making some of the most affecting work in their field—quietly, that is, until the world started handing them awards for it.
Their web series, Time Together, recently took home a Bronze Anthem Award for Human & Civil Rights, placing their work alongside purpose-driven projects from 42 countries. And just days before that, their documentary, Going Inside, earned Best Documentary at the Texas Short Film Festival.
This newest body of work lands squarely in the realm of empathy, justice and human transformation. The couple’s company, Humans Being Media, was founded eight years ago specifically to serve changemakers: nonprofits, foundations, NGOs and mission-driven organizations that need their stories told with artistry and emotional clarity.
The Time Together project began when Megan McDrew, founder and executive director of the Transformative Justice Center of Monterey, invited them to document its Empathy in Action program inside Soledad Prison. And the premise is deceptively simple: Bring volunteers from the outside into deep, facilitated conversations with incarcerated men participating in rehabilitation programs. What unfolds in these rooms—raw vulnerability, accountability, grief, catharsis—is something few of us ever witness.
“There’s this very special alchemy that happens,” Vince Beeton says. “You can have somebody who was convicted of a murder 20 years ago, and a woman who’s had a child killed… These conversations can be not just vulnerable, but healing.”
But access is its own odyssey. How does one bring a camera crew into a prison facility? “Not easily,” he says with a laugh. Every piece of equipment, “every single screw,” must be logged. Yet the greater challenge is trust. Sometimes he has only seven minutes with a subject. “So we just drop in fast,” he explains. “We are not there to question [their crime]. We are there to see who they are now, in this moment, and where they are along their rehabilitation journey.”
One of the most compelling figures in the series is Jose “Junior” Guzman, born into gang culture and offered no alternatives. “When other people of my age were choosing which college they were gonna go to, I was choosing which gang I was gonna go into,” Vince Beeton recalls him saying. Guzman has since become a facilitator within the prison, guiding others through the same transformative process.
These aren’t easy spaces, but they are deeply affecting ones. At one screening inside the prison, the Beetons showed the finished film to the men who appear in it—and read aloud messages of public response. “That was a really special experience,” Alia Beeton says. “To see how they were affected by their own stories.”
The public was equally moved. “People really wanted to get involved,” she notes. And in Austin, after winning Best Documentary, serendipity struck. An elderly philanthropist, featured in another film, approached them. “He said, ‘I thought I was coming here on behalf of my film, but I know now I was here to see your film. How can I get involved?’”
That’s the magic of this work—its ability to ripple outward.
Their Anthem Award win affirmed that mission-driven storytelling, when executed at a high level, can shift narratives around incarceration, reform and humanity itself. Vince Beeton, who spent 25 years in broadcast television—including time as a DP (director of photography) on Mythbusters—has built Humans Being Media with Alia around that principle: Use world-class craft to elevate stories that traditionally go unseen.
“If I am tearing up in the edit suite,” he says, “then I know it’s having the right effect.”
More is on the horizon. The couple continues working with nonprofits across the North Bay and beyond. Their compass remains true: Tell the stories of transformation, redemption and human potential.
“We believe that’s possible for everybody,” Alia Beeton says.
And with their cameras rolling, they make us believe it too.
