Elhu Studios was founded by filmmaker James Coleman, whose work explores time, memory, and the thin boundaries between the seen and the unseen.

The studio’s name reflects a belief that film is a kind of vessel — something that carries light, sound, and memory across generations. Our stories draw from history and imagination in equal measure, tracing the quiet connections between past and present.

James descends from Thomas Coleman of Nantucket, an early settler who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century to begin a life on the edge of the known world, and from Elihu Coleman, a Quaker writer who raised his voice against slavery long before abolition was common cause. That lineage — of departure, survival, conviction, and reinvention — informs the way we tell stories today. Every film, like every voyage, begins with a step into the unknown.

At Elhu Studios, we see cinema as an act of inheritance: the past doesn’t disappear — it changes form, flickering through images, shaping what we make and how we see.