How to Make an Authentic Movie About Someone Else's Story

The Emmy award-winning co-directors of Berlinale premiere ‘For Ahkeem', Jeremy S. Levine and Landon Van Soest, and one of the film’s producers, Iyabo Boyd, join No Film School’s Liz Nord for a frank and fascinating discussion about how to overcome the challenges inherent in telling the story of someone whose background is entirely different from your own. In this case, the film’s co-directors are two, middle-class white men from New York City, and their subject is a charismatic, 17-year-old African-American girl named Daje Shelton from outside of Ferguson, Missouri, where fellow black teenager Michael Brown had been famously shot and killed by police. In order to authentically portray this story as outsiders, Levine and Van Soest made Shelton a partner in the filmmaking process, and diversified the larger crew of people working on their film, including Boyd, their female, African-American producer.

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