In the course of the Part 2 Review/Q&A, it made sense to this interviewer to ask Bole Essien about up and coming projects as well as what inspired – and even if she had some words for advice for my students. By Gregg W. Morris.
The Becoming Abie series was made by Bolu Essien’s Nigerian-based production company Evolving Light Studios, which she founded alongside her husband, Emmanuel Essien, and is distributed by Nigerian distributor FilmOne.
BECOMING ABIE is a six-episode Netflix dramedy featuring a Nigerian millennial, female, articulate and brainy, feisty, articulate and gorgeous, in her first job as a new hire in a topnotch Lagos advertising firm where she must learn the ropes of…
About a curmudgeonly gay man with achondroplasia and a free-spirited sex worker who form a one-of-a-kind bond in a world that wants to grind them out like a cigarette butt.” – Review (Part 2) by Gregg W. Morris
An enigmatic, mind bending road movie with flourishes of the psychedelic, avant-garde, surreal, transcendental, to say the least. – By Gregg W. Morris
AFTER SHE DIED follows a young woman who’s freaked that her father’s new girlfriend looks exactly like her dead mother.–[Doppelgänger Alert.] Destined to Develop a Cult Following? Inexplicably weird, horror-supernatural movies might improve their fates for success, if they find…
Director Laura Waters Hinson’s STREET REPORTER is a captivating documentary about homelessness featuring a homeless person cum photo journalist pursuing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about homeless in the Nation’s Capitol. Advocacy, investigative and ethnographic journalism are fused transcendently in this 26-minute film short packing the wallop of those full length, five-star documentary films. Critics raves’ and reviews about this award winning film aren’t shy calling it as an Oscar contender.
Biographical Sierra Pettengill, Director Focuses on the warped narratives of the American past. Most recently, she directed the archival short The Rifleman, which premiered at the 2021Sundance Film Festival. Her 2017 feature-length film, the all-archival documentary The Reagan Show,…
In RIOTSVILLE, USA, Director Sierra Pettengill, like a consummate painter with a cinematic palette, fuses archival national news media reportage from the late 1960s with archival U.S. military film and video footage from that same period in a cinematic exposition exposing the insidious nature of the militarization which was – and continues to be – primarily, but not exclusively, focused on Black people fighting for the real Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pettengill’s paints veraciously without one misstep of historical and philosophical significance unlike so many other chroniclers, filmmakers and documentarians of that period. – By Gregg W. Morris
Director Joshua Seftel: “To me, this is the story of a collision course between Richard “Mac” McKinney and the congregants of the Muncie Islamic Center. It’s a story so relevant to our world today – a world filled with misunderstanding, people taking sides, and seemingly unbridgeable societal gaps – and yet this story shows there is hope. I believe the film can serve as a glimpse into what is possible when we stay open and kind, a story about family, compassion, and forgiveness.” – Review by Gregg W. Morris