Chaille's film career began accidentally at age 6, when he was having trouble organizing himself and getting dressed for school. Diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD), his neurologist recommended he take up fencing or golf to help him keep focused. But several weeks after watching an uncle perform in "The Nutcracker," Chaille enrolled in the Miami City Ballet School. A close family friend told Chaille that all male ballet dancers were destined to be gay. Not knowing what the word "gay" meant, Chaille decided to find out.

Wearing his ballet gear on the street, he observed other kids' reactions, and later interviewed basketball players, psychologists and other dancers. Using a borrowed video camera, he documented his research. The result, "Boys in Tights," won a $600 first prize at the Miami Children's Film Festival in 1998. At the National Children's Film Festival, Delores Morris, vice president at HBO Family, bought his film and offered to broadcast several of Chaille's other projects.

Tiana Vermette had to confront her own challenges. "My culture is basically dying," she said. Tiana loved the rich story-telling traditions of her tribal elders, but noticed many other Indian Island native children did not. One day, Tiana observed that her niece, Kortney Simonds, "refused to listen to any of my folklore stories. She was fascinated only by the Indian cartoon characters on the TV screen." Tiana decided to preserve her tribe's oral tradition through film. Her latest, "Windbird," an 18-minute clay and latex animation, attracted the interest of several major film festivals, including Sundance and the Atlantic Film Festival.

While Tiana plans to reshoot "Windbird," expanding it to a half-hour TV animated film, Chaille will head to Hollywood to direct his first feature film, "Camp Grizzly," a $2 million Emmett/Furla Films Production starring Dan Haggerty. This will make him the youngest feature film director in the world. Currently, Chaille is writing two feature film scripts and is completing the editing of "Little Monk," a one-hour HBO documentary shot in India last year, which follows the initiation of a 7-year-old monk into a Tibetan monastery.

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