When Dee Rees makes her first feature, Pariah, she‘ll be following the path set by the filmmakers of such successful indies as Half Nelson and Raising Victor Vargas. That is, she‘ll be transforming an acclaimed short — one that has played multiple festivals including Sundance in 2008 and which won the Audience Award at the L.A. Film Festival in 2007 — into a full-length film. The difference, however, is that rather than expand her short into a feature, she previously shrunk the feature script into the short. Rees wrote the full-length Pariah while interning on Spike Lee‘s Inside Man in 2005. A year later, when she needed to shoot a thesis film to graduate from NYU‘s Graduate Film Program, she decided to take the first act of her feature script and its ending and make a tale of a conflicted Bronx teen living a dual life between her conservative family and her gay friends at the local nightspots.

Rees, who cites Toni Morrison and Alice Walker as creative influences, calls the film “semiautobiographical, in the sense that it took me awhile to figure out who I was. Living in New York I was amazed to see young teen women unafraid to express their sexuality. I thought, if I had known who I was at 17, would I have had the courage to express it?”

The short version of Pariah follows Alike, a closeted gay teen (powerfully played by the striking Adepero Oduye) locked in a confrontation between her emerging identity as a lesbian and her denying parents. It features fantastic performances and a beautifully expressive visual design. Bradford Young‘s camera sets Alike against a variety of color-saturated backdrops that plunge the viewer into the character‘s shifting emotions. “Alike is a chameleon,” Rees says, “and we wanted her to be painted by the light around her. In the club she‘s purple, in the bus she‘s green and at home she‘s orange. The only time she is free is when she is outside at the end of the movie.”

Rees hopes to make the feature version of Pariah this fall. Nekisa Cooper is producing, Effie Brown has signed on as executive producer, and the project has received the full imprimatur of the Sundance Institute: Rees attended the Sundance Writers‘ and Directors‘ Labs, and Cooper will attend the first Sundance Creative Producers‘ Lab. The new version of Pariah will be one that is well-informed by the process of making the short film and attending the Sundance Labs. “It‘s changed a lot [from the original script],” she admits. “I learned a lot of things about character, and making the shorts I saw that you can say so much with looks and body language. You don‘t need as many words.”

While she raises money for her feature, Rees, who recently moved from New York City to Long Beach, Calif., is finishing another project, Eventual Salvation, a feature documentary on Liberia that received funding from the Sundance Documentary Fund and won the 2007 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award.