Releasing A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers and Art Within in 2025
Hello all!
As of today—August 29th, 2024—Art Within’s first feature documentary, A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, has officially been completed and shown to a lively and energetic audience at The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, TN.
We’re so thrilled to have made it this far and finished the first of many artistic works Art Within aims to help to bring about in the coming years. Now, we’re moving toward a release tour for A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, gathering people in various churches and communities in the US to experience the film and discuss it together. If you’d like to host a showing in your area, don’t hesitate to reach out! At Art Within, we believe that art is meant to be experienced in community—and we plan to empower as many people as possible to make that happen in theirs. We’re already planning additional showings of the film in Atlanta and Charlotte, with more to come!
What’s Next for Art Within?
While A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers has been the focus of most of Art Within’s energy in the last two years, going into 2025 we’ll be planning to broaden our scope. Our goal is to commission 3-5 shortform documentaries throughout 2025—some of them by Houston & Debbie Coley, and others by talented new voices—intended for the same purpose of gathering people to discuss them together and see God and The Kingdom in new and surprising ways. We’ve talked about it before, but our belief at Art Within is that documentaries can be a powerful force for revealing God’s continued work in the world—especially in a world that is increasingly wrestling with how to know what’s true or whether we even live in the same reality as the people around us. In a landscape as divided as this one, the experience of beholding real stories captured beautifully, side-by-side with others, can be a healing force that draws people back into a shared reality by witnessing something true and honest together.
We can’t talk about the specific details of any of these upcoming shortform projects yet, but as we head into this release tour for A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers in the US, these films will be taking shape in the background approaching 2025. It’s exciting to say that given the length of these shorter projects, it won’t be another 2-year wait for Art Within’s next new work! We look forward to sharing more in the future—and no doubt, The Art Within Podcast Season 2 will be a place to continue to hear more about the latest developments!
If you’d like to support Art Within’s mission and vision and our continued work throughout 2025, we’d greatly appreciate your donations and involvement in what’s next. Thanks for being here on the journey!