Director’s Statement

For nearly a decade, I kept returning to film Peppermint while both her life and the world around her were changing in real time. 

When we first started shooting, there was no clear roadmap for what the film would become. I wasn’t interested in making a celebrity profile or a film built around a single breakthrough moment. What stayed with me over the years was the accumulation of everything happening around the spotlight: the late-night rides home, the tiny apartments, the rehearsals, the exhaustion, the friendships, the performances, the waiting, the survival.
Early production days, NYC (2017)
 FINAL V.O. recordingS at the studio, NYC (2024)
Peppermint has always carried an unusual ability to create space around her. People are drawn to her not only because of her talent, but because of the care, humor, intelligence, and emotional honesty she brings into a room. I wanted the film to stay close to those qualities and show her humanity, complexity, and TRUE COLORS. 
As filming continued, I realized the documentary was also capturing something larger than one person’s story. It was preserving a rapidly changing queer cultural ecosystem in New York City across the 2010s and early 2020s — nightlife, drag, chosen family, activism, artistic labor, and the complicated reality of becoming publicly visible as a Black trans woman in America.
FILMING PEPPERMINT and SHERRY VINE, NYC (2017)
Post-PRODUCTION Callsheet (2018)
Many of the spaces and moments in this film are rarely treated as historical spaces, even though they shape people’s lives profoundly. Dressing rooms, sidewalks after performances, conversations between friends, small clubs struggling to survive, moments of recovery after being publicly “on.” I wanted the camera to remain present long enough for those environments to feel lived in rather than explained from a distance.

The longer I worked on the project, the more I understood that visibility itself is not a simple resolution. Public recognition can create opportunity, but it also creates pressure, exposure, projection, and emotional fatigue. I wanted the film to remain inside those contradictions rather than smoothing them over.

SOUND Editing AT THE studio (2025)
Film Poster Fresh From Print (2025)
world premiere at frameline, San francisco (2025)
At its core, A Deeper Love is about performance, survival, friendship, labor, and the ongoing process of creating yourself while the world is constantly trying to define you first. It is also about the communities that make that process possible. The people who hold each other up behind the scenes. The spaces where queer life continues to reinvent itself even when those spaces are fragile or temporary.

I hope the film allows audiences to spend time inside experiences that are often flattened into headlines, discourse, or political abstraction. More than anything, I wanted to preserve presence: the feeling of being there while these lives, relationships, and histories were still unfolding.
Oriel Pe’er
Director/Producer
A Deeper Love: The Story of Miss PepperminT
last shoot day, NYC