In a yr that’s felt just like the fingers of time are slowly ticking backward — with the anti-diversity, fairness and inclusion political local weather reversing company guarantees in a post-George Floyd world and Hollywood backtracking on variety applications to appease Donald Trump’s second presidential time period — it’s comforting to know some secure areas for these communities have nonetheless discovered the means to exist with out scrutiny.
That’s partly what makes the inception of Surrounded By Tales, a one-night-only showcase devoted to spotlighting unreleased works from neglected Black voices in movie, so transferring.
Set for June 21 at New York Metropolis’s historic SVA Theatre (the identical theater utilized by the Tribeca Movie Competition), the intimate occasion goals to rejoice Black storytelling by providing creatives a spot to debut their quick movies, interact in real-talk panel discussions and rub elbows with trade figures like “Power” star Naturi Naughton, “The Wire” alum Chad Coleman, “The Real Housewives of New York City” star Racquel Chevremont and plenty of others.
What makes the inaugural showcase much more compelling are the dynamic hosts behind it: Grammy-nominated artist and actor Tristan Mack Wilds and award-winning filmmaker Greg Cally, two trade veterans pouring their years of expertise and experience into an initiative that intentionally challenges the anti-DEI agenda plaguing elements of the leisure trade.
Going in opposition to the Hollywood grain to construct an area that doesn’t revolve round trade politics, awards or exclusivity is not any simple feat. Doing it with the only goal of giving marginalized artists extra entry and instruments and funding it from their very own pockets? That’s simply uncommon.
Nevertheless, Cally and Wilds observed a niche that also hasn’t been meaningfully crammed within the movie trade: a scarcity of areas the place underrepresented creatives can share their work with out having to leap by hoops for alternatives.
Positive, large-scale festivals like Sundance, Tribeca, Venice and extra exist already to assist rising storytellers set up themselves. Nevertheless, they’re nonetheless extremely aggressive and really pricey areas to be in, and as Cally notes, there merely aren’t sufficient targeted on elevating filmmakers themselves.
That’s the place Surrounded By Tales is available in. There are not any awards or excessive stakes to fret about. The occasion is just a vessel for creatives to point out their tasks with no strings hooked up.
“You’re just showing the work and celebrating that,” Cally says. “You’re celebrating community and the film. And for one day, you can worry about not selling it to someone. Whether a distributor says yes or no, whether the box office numbers are great, whether you got nominated for an Emmy… This is just about the project and seeing how people react to it, and sharing these different actors that are [involved].”
“We need to have places that uplift us in the success of creating art,” Wilds provides, “but also help guide us in a direction that can make our art better… Something that is more geared towards the creator and not the distribution of said art.”
The showcase portion of Surrounded By Tales was born out of a string of trade rejections, based on Wilds and Cally. It additionally stemmed from a need to get their quick movies in entrance of audiences “without worrying about a middleman.”
“A big part of this business is soliciting yourself, getting yourself in front of different people, film festivals, etc.,” Wilds explains. “Whether you’re an actor or a director or a writer or whatever you do, it comes with a lot of ‘nos’.”
He provides, “After a while, we wanted to get to a place where not only can we showcase our stuff and not have to worry about somebody saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to us, but also give other people an opportunity to be around like-minded creatives and build their stuff to a better place.”
Surrounded By Tales isn’t Wilds and Cally’s first inventive collaboration. The 2 beforehand labored on the previous’s Tidal-released “AfterHours” mini-series and his 2021 quick movie “Wouldn’t Mean Nuthin’.” In addition they not too long ago co-launched their Surrounded By Water movie collective, which helped produce their upcoming showcase.
Humorous sufficient, the best way the longtime collaborators first related started equally to this dialog, when Cally, a then-journalist, interviewed his actor-singer good friend over a decade in the past.
“We were on the phone talking, and then it just turned into a friend-type of conversation,” he recollects. “He was talking about his age — he was born the same year as me. And then all of these similarities kept coming across — his family’s from [the Dominican Republic]; my family’s Haitian… It literally just started with an interview, and we kind of caught a vibe.”
Round that point, Wilds — finest recognized for his roles in “The Wire,” “90210” and “Swagger”— was concentrating on his music profession however desperate to return to movie. In the meantime, Cally was seeking to pivot away from journalism to discover new avenues of storytelling, which led him to filmmaking (“D. Wade: Life Unexpected,” “Never Would Have Made It: The Marvin Sapp Story”).
“I saw where he was with it — how he wanted to start creating stuff, and he saw how I wanted to start creating stuff, and it just slowly started to tick,” says Wilds. “Things just started to fall in place perfectly.”
With their shared ambitions in thoughts, the pair struck up a inventive partnership and started pursuing their targets behind the digital camera. That finally led to the thought for his or her immersive showcase.
Initially, the duo meant to provide movies collectively and discover a method to get them seen at movie festivals — till they encountered “gatekeepers.”
“These film festivals get to choose who gets seen and who doesn’t,” Cally explains, noting that some may be “very predatory, because they’re preying on people that have hope.”
“So, we’re creating these great films that we’re passionate about, but now we don’t have a platform to share ’em because you gotta have a relationship with the festival programmers, or you gotta have a bunch of five-star celebrities, or you gotta talk about what they deem is a trending topic at the time in order for it to be seen,” he continues.
“Us going through this process, getting a lot of nos from film festivals, getting into some festivals, and being led to believe we were gonna win. And then being on stage and receiving that loss, that’s when you realize, ‘Oh, they’re leveraging the celebrity that Mack has to sell tickets, but they don’t plan on actually honoring us in that way.’”
Lastly, he says, the 2 determined, “Yo, let’s create a film showcase where everybody’s a winner in the room.”
From what Cally and Wilds describe, Surrounded By Tales isn’t an odd movie showcase. Along with providing creators and expertise a platform to amplify their voices, the 2 additionally needed to mix a night of leisure with foundational pillars like group and training. The networking mixer and particular visitor panels embrace “Summer House: Martha’s Vineyard” star Jasmine Ellis Cooper, Emmy-nominated govt producer and director One9 (“Time is Illmatic”), “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and “Potomac” govt producer Eric D. Fuller, “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls” producer Jessica Hubert and “Zatima” actor Guyviaud Joseph.
The objective was to facilitate a free movement of concepts between A-list expertise and people individuals is probably not conversant in but, all in the identical area.
“We wanted people who we knew weren’t going to come in here from a diva standpoint,” Cally says of associates and celebrities they contacted, “who were willing to touch the people and interact, and had something interesting to speak on.”
That reasoning additionally extends to the highly effective quick movies that had been chosen to display on the showcase, two of which Cally and Wilds helped create.
“Spillover” — co-written by former cop William McGarry, directed by Cally, and govt produced by Wilds and Phil Tudeme, one other former cop — delves into the complexities of group policing within the wake of a life-changing incident involving two lifelong associates and a white rookie cop.
“These are two cops who worked in some of the toughest urban neighborhoods, and they wanted to tell a story about that,” Cally shares, including that he and Wilds confronted resistance from some festivals because of the present local weather round DEI. “We just wanted to help bring this story to life. We felt it was an important story that needed to be seen.”
“We’re seeing that the film is being a little bit suppressed in terms of how it’s treated… So, we’ll see how the audience reacts, and that’s how we’ll be able to tell if this is politics or if we just made a bad movie,” the director jokes.
In the meantime, “Sincerely Brad,” directed by Isaac Yowman and co-written by Cally, options “Martin” alum Carl Anthony Payne and “Doc” star Patrick Walker in a brief about an astronaut getting ready to turning into the primary Black man on the moon — solely to grapple with the non-public price of his historic mission. Rounding out the lineup is “333,” a deeply private quick written and directed by Naturi Naughton, which explores the emotional toll of womanhood amid restrictive abortion legal guidelines and the continued battle for reproductive autonomy.
Based on Wilds, the tasks weren’t chosen solely for his or her social timeliness, however “the pieces just fit together.”
Cally provides that, whereas they hadn’t set out with an overt political agenda, the 2 got here to appreciate, halfway by planning, that their collective effort was, in reality, fairly “radical” in spotlighting points which might be not often granted nuance onscreen. It gave their showcase much more urgency and goal.
“We were like, ‘Wow.’ All these conversations we were having were manifesting themselves into something tangible,” Cally remarks. “So, instead of just complaining about what the problem was, we started to make a solution. And before we knew it, we were like, ‘Oh, shoot, we’re actually solving our own problem.’”
Surrounded By Tales is taking its mission a step additional this weekend with the inaugural launch of the Michael Okay. Williams Inventive Fellowship, an initiative created in honor of the late “The Wire” actor with permission from his property. By way of this fellowship, the recipient will earn one-on-one coaching, mentorship, entry to trade sources and even the chance to work on Cally and Wilds’ movie tasks.
“Me and Mack both got to work with Mike at different times in our lives, and he became a big brother to both of us,” says Cally, who produced one in all Williams’ final tv tasks, Vice TV’s “Black Market” sequence. “We’re getting ready to give back some of what he gave to us, which was something that he was really proud about.”
He provides, “Michael K. would say, ‘Yo, call me big bro.’ So we get to tell this young person, ‘We big bro,’ for the next year.”
Discussions across the subsequent Surrounded By Tales showcase haven’t began simply but, however Cally and Wilds are dedicated to creating it an annual celebration of movie and Black artistry — if to not entertain, educate or encourage, then on the very least to “keep open spaces for our stories.”
“They’re gonna try to delete our stuff as much as they possibly can. They’re gonna try to delete our history and our narrative,” says Wilds. “But just as fast as they delete it, we just have to constantly make more so that the people can hear our stories.”
“New York being the city that it is, it feels like it’s about time for Black artists, for our people, to have a space where they can show up, show out, and not have to worry about the back-and-forth of what it means to make art,” Wilds continues. Simply have a day to rejoice one another, rejoice yourselves, and simply take pleasure in artwork.”
Surrounded By Tales is simply getting began. And with a transparent imaginative and prescient to uplift a brand new crop of creatives, Cally sees it as the start of one thing even greater.
“So, if you have the means to be there,” he says, “come through, have a good time, wear something nice, and we look forward to meeting you.”
Tickets for the Surrounded By Tales movie showcase can be found right here.
