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I am black, so with my writing and my voice, you get that kind of dialect.
Poor is the new black. So on this film [The Land], there are poor black people, but there are also poor Latinos, and poor white people as well.
I think we're used to the black filmmaker coming in and making the all-black subject matter. Especially at Sundance, they're looking for that. It's funny because amongst my filmmaker friends talk about this.
The subject matter itself lends itself to the black side because the kids are drug dealers and kids that are getting shot by police and getting shot by themselves. People automatically associate that with blackness because of the news.
We have our classic hood movies, right? Like "Boyz in the Hood." We have our classic conscious films like Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," or "Stand By Me." Even beyond Coogler, there are black films that are just voices. So the intention behind this ["The Land"] was to capture today's.
I've been with the project for like three years: creating it, pushing it. [There] becomes a certain doubt when you're pitching this story to people. ["The Land" is] a cautionary tale. It's not the brightest or best ending to a film when you're telling a cautionary tale about four kids, kids who are killing each other, kids who are products of the streets.
I wanted to make sure the focus [in The Land] was on human beings themselves and their decisions, but still connected to the urban environment that people associate as being black. I think I was able to make a film without commenting on "black this or black that" and you still feel the presence of it. There's no one character who's saying "we're all black and we're all in this struggle." It's that you just feel it. Some of that is because we get the sense from a lot of independent films that black people struggle all the time.