Anyone I’ve spoken too for more than 10 minutes knows I want to be the Spike Lee of PG County, Maryland, so when my aunt sent me the link to his Masterclass I had to cop that membership. As expected of a Spike Lee joint, the class was worth every penny! As a good student, I’m completing one of the assignments of the class which was to articulate your purpose as a filmmaker among other things. My purpose as a filmmaker is to liberate minds, change the narrative about my community, and continue the legacy of black excellence in storytelling. I have to leverage the call God placed on my life to do this work of storytelling because onscreen images influence the way my people are viewed in society. The beautiful people around me inspire me to make films, films I love, and films that make me cringe inspire me to make films. True stories and untold stories inspire me to create films. Love inspires me to make films and suffering in the world inspires me to make films. An internal hunger and respect for the craft inspire me to make films.
Films show the human condition in all its jaded glory, filmmaking is sacred and vulnerable, and dropping a new project is an act of courage on behalf of the creatives that made it. Filmmaking is putting yourself out there for the world to critique because you love other people enough to want to share joy and knowledge with them. I love that filmmaking requires research and a skillset, to quote Spike Lee “there ain’t no half-stepping.” I love that watching films together bonds people and lines from a script integrate themselves into mundane conversations and pop culture. I want to tell stories that educate and uplift the marginalized, but I also hope to bond people across cultures. I know from Basketball season at Howard University that The struggles you face on set bond you with the dope creatives you’re working with and create lifelong memories. The finished product of what you create on-set, be it a movie or a Livestream of a game encourages camaraderie among laughing moviegoers or die-hard fans of a team. Movies also bond creatives with audiences that they may never meet. The bond between creatives and audiences doesn’t make them homies necessarily, but the relationship is intimate enough that creatives have a responsibility to honor their audience. Images transcend the screen and great art advances society.
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
Malcolm X
Camille Alexander 