4 young Black LI filmmakers on making movies and telling stories

When it comes to making movies, these four young Black Long Island filmmakers face the same challenges as anyone trying to break into the industry — and then some. They need to create compelling content, raise money, find ways within their budgets to produce their films, and hustle to make contacts who they hope will believe in their work.

But they also want to showcase characters that look like them and shine a spotlight on plots that reflect the rich, varied, nuanced everyday worlds they live in, all the while telling stories from their own points of view and breaking barriers between people, they said.

In Hollywood, Black producers, writers and directors represent less than 6% of offscreen talent and even less in some genres like superhero films, according to a 2021 report from the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. “Our conversations with professionals in the field reveal that Black talent tends to be shut out of projects unless senior team members are Black,” the report states. Opening doors to Black creatives could bring an additional estimated $10 billion annually to the entertainment industry, according to McKinsey’s analysis.

The biggest obstacle for Black filmmakers trying to enter the historically white space is getting their foot in the door, said Kurt Damas, a Black independent filmmaker who lives in Dix Hills. “We’re just now getting our opportunity,” he said. “So that’s where the challenge is — those opportunities to sit in a room with somebody who looks like us, or comes from where we come from.”

Despite those challenges, LIU Post adjunct film professor Henry Arroyo tells his students, just keep making those films.

“It’s about getting the work made, how you can, at your level,” he said.

WILLIAM FORD
@youngxwill on Instagram

WHO HE IS: The Brentwood native, 30, is a stagehand electrician at Madison Square Garden, where he works on show lighting. He studied theater at Suffolk County Community College, dropping out after an uncle, the head electrician for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” helped him get a start on the morning show. Ford shared in two daytime Emmy Awards and two Edward R. Murrow Awards for his work. He lives in Harlem.

HIS FILMS SO FAR: He’s worked on two films for the nationwide IATSE Local 52 filmmaking union, including helping to build and light the sets for Adam Sandler’s 2024 film “Spaceman.” He was a grip for “Speak to Me,” an indie film by Long Island’s Kurt Damas about young men and grief. He is currently working with Damas on a “Romeo and Juliet”-inspired yet-to-be-named film, which includes scenes shot on Long Island.

THOUGHTS ABOUT LIGHTING IN FILM: “Working in the industry so much, I’ve developed a passion for lights,” he said. “I realized how drastically a set can change due to lighting.”

AN IMPORTANT THEME: “There’s a level of introspection that we all have,” Ford said. “Film is really just giving a voice to that introspection, as opposed to everybody feeling like they’re crazy. It’s really just dissipating the lines between you.” In the end, Ford says he hopes to show that all of us are “not that different.”

WHAT HE WANTS TO CHANGE: As part of the third generation of Black stagehands, Ford said he feels a responsibility to help provide more access to newcomers in the industry. “I’m beginning to see more people, more Black people, more people of color, in spaces, but there’s still not a lot of influx,” he said.

HIS DREAM: Ford is a drummer and songwriter in the rock band Radiate. “I want to shoot a film as a director, and I also want to score it as well,” he said.

ABENA AKYAA
@abena.akyaa.aa on Instagram

WHO SHE IS: The East Patchogue native is an office production assistant for the CBS show “Elsbeth.” Akyaa, 24, now lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn, but she spends many weekends back home. She received her bachelor’s degree in film and media studies from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

HER WORK SO FAR: She is creator and showrunner for the in-production eight-episode web series “Entrepreneurs,” about two cousins recently out of college who reconnect after many years to open a Black-owned cafe on Long Island. Her $6,000 budget has allowed her to shoot select scenes, in the hope of receiving more funding to film the whole series. “In this industry, they need to see that you’re serious,” she said. She received about half the money from a Huntington Arts Council grant. The rest came from crowdfunding from family members and friends. She said she will be applying for more grants and attending film festivals to network.

WHY SHE WANTED TO BE A FILMMAKER: “My main objective is to tell stories that center around POC [people of color] that are actually positive stories,” Akyaa said. “It feels like every story around us is trauma based. It’s slavery, or it’s gangs. To see it all the time is exhausting. Why don’t we have rom-coms? Why don’t we have coming-of-age stories?” That’s why she thinks feel-good TV shows such as ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” with its diverse cast, are so popular, she said.

IMPORTANT THEME IN HER WORK: “I feel like we’re kind of in a day and age now where we’re all struggling to be social,” she said. “I want to be able to create stories that make people feel like it’s OK to be vulnerable.”

TERRANCE DAYE
@terranceddaye on Instagram

WHO HE IS: The Deer Park resident, 29, is a staff writer for “The Ms. Pat Show” streaming on BET+. With a bachelor’s degree in cinema, television and emerging media studies from Morehouse College in Atlanta and a master’s from the Graduate Film program at New York University, Daye said he has also worked behind the scenes at Disney and Netflix.

HIS FILMS: Daye’s work includes “Ship: A Visual Poem,” which deals with the confusing lessons about masculinity a Black boy learns at a funeral. It was awarded the Short Film Jury Prize for U.S. Fiction at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. He has also received acclaim for 2018’s “Cherish,” about a Black boy who tries to learn to fly, and 2017’s “The Colored Hospital: A Visual Poem,” an abstract short film. Daye has been named a Spike Lee Production Fund recipient twice, and received the 2020 NewFest Film Festival Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award, among other accolades.

A MESSAGE IN HIS WORK: “I think the most important thing to me is how we relate to other people,” Daye said. “Stories allow us to bridge those connections, to slow down time and to recognize how much we have in common.”

ARTISTIC INFLUENCES: Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki is unafraid of silence, Daye said. “You don’t see that a lot in animation, and I just love that he’s not afraid . . . to sit in an emotion and allow the audience to draw their own conclusions,” he said. While the late Toni Morrison was a writer, “what she does with language is similar to what I want to be able to achieve visually — she finds entry points into characters’ lives that sort of don’t take the easy path.”

UPCOMING PROJECTS: Daye is directing “Pritty,” which follows a queer Black youth coming of age in Georgia. A preview on YouTube went viral, raising $115,000 of the up to $800,000 he and his creative partner need to finish the animated production. Daye is also working on his first feature film, “Mandingo,” about someone reacclimating to life on Long Island after prison.

BRIANA ATKINS
@a_briana1998 on Instagram

WHO SHE IS: The Lakeview resident, 26, holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the Macaulay Honors College at City College of New York and a master’s degree in experimental humanities and social engagement from New York University. She’s currently looking for a position in entertainment or media as she pursues her filmmaking career.

A SPECIAL PROJECT: During her graduate studies, Atkins focused on advancing Black storytelling from different cultures, regions and languages. She founded the digital Likkle Global Film Archive, a repository for hundreds of works. In Jamaica, where her family is from, “Likkle” loosely translates to “we’re small but mighty,” she said. “It has to do with the fact that Jamaica is a really small country, but we have a lot of global influence.”

HER MOST IMPORTANT WORK SO FAR: Atkins’ 21-minute film “The Bridal Night” started as a thesis project. The $25,000 production, shot in three days at a Melville studio, was recently screened at the Film Folklore Festival in Trinidad and Tobago, she said. Atkins wrote the screenplay, which features an all-female cast and each character telling a torn bride-to-be why she should, or shouldn’t, get married the next day.

WHAT SHE WANTS TO TELL THE WORLD: “The thing that’s most important to me, and probably why I spent so much time in school studying it, is the variety of stories from Black people,” she said. “For a very long time, our art hasn’t been valued the way it deserves to be. It hasn’t been examined and looked at, and still isn’t, with the same verve and tenacity that other people have for other people’s works. And I guess I just want people to become more aware of that block and that bias that they have toward Black art, and start treating it with the respect it deserves.”

A previous version of this story misidentified the film festival where Briana Atkins' film "The Bridal Night" was shown