This Black History month, we are celebrating Black filmmakers. Each week we will be celebrating filmmakers from different parts of the industry. And today, we celebrate a selection of emerging and up-and-coming Black filmmakers whose careers you should be following.
Haley Elizabeth Anderson
Haley Elizabeth Anderson is a filmmaker, writer, and photo-based visual artist from Houston, Texas, who graduated from NYU’s Tisch programme. Her work has been featured at the Barbican in London, The Shed in New York, Le Cinema Club, the Criterion Channel, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Sundance. She was recently selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Her short film ‘If There Is a Light there’ was singled out by Queen Latifah and Dee Rees at Tribeca 2019, and ‘Pillars’ put her on the map at Sundance 2020.
‘Pillars’ in a coming of age short which follows a young Black girl from a devout family exploring her sexuality.
Watch the trailer here:
Tayler Montague
Tayler Montague is a filmmaker, writer, curator and native New Yorker. A graduate of SUNY Purchase with a degree in Communications, Montague seeks to tell stories that place Black people front and center, building upon the legacy of Black storytelling she grew up with.
Her debut short film, ‘In Sudden Darkness’, about a young working-class family in the Bronx navigating the Northeast blackout of 2003, is—contrary to its bleak-sounding title—a portrait of profound love and joy.
Find out more here: https://www.taylermontague.xyz/
Nikyatu Jusu
Sierra Leonean-American Filmmaker Nikyatu’s films have screened at festivals nationally and internationally. With a BA from Duke University and an MFA from NYU’s Tisch Graduate Film school, she’s earned various awards including NYU’s Spike Lee Fellowship Award, the Princess Grace Narrative film grant and Director’s Guild of America Honorable Mentions.
In ‘Suicide by Sunlight’ Valentina, a day-walking black vampire protected from the sun by her melanin, is forced to restrain her bloodlust to regain custody of her estranged daughters
Jamil McGinnis
Jamil McGinnis is a Turkish and African American filmmaker/photographer originally from Kaiserslautern, Germany. His interest in film began at a young age with an extensive background in photography. He earned a BA from the business school at Florida A&M University and worked on Wall Street as a stockbroker before he entered the film industry. He has worked as a producer at Droga5, one of the top advertising agencies in the country.
‘Things I Carry Into the World’ is a filmic interpretation of a spoken word verse by American poet and storyteller Cynthia Manick, that Jamil created with Pat Heywood, a fellow Brooklyn-based director. It is an abstract meditation on the body, the feminine, the everyday realities of being young and black, and the fragile relationship between the manmade and the natural.
Kate Gondwe
Kate is a recent graduate of Emerson College, a Sundance Catalyst Fellow, and the founder and president of DEDZA Films, a boutique film distributor & hybrid consulting agency dedicated to bringing nuanced films by underrepresented filmmakers to new audiences.
The company’s first release, Who Will Start Another Fire, is a short film omnibus featuring work by emerging filmmakers from underrepresented communities around the world.
Watch the trailer below: