A young man's journey on the brink of sexual and self discovery on the day his city is on the brink of destruction at the hands of Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Commissioned as part of our CCCV Stories series, where filmmakers created stories inspired by Miami neighborhoods for Borscht 6. Tarell Alvin McCraney and Lucas Leyva's film takes place in Liberty City.
director: Lucas Leyva
writer: Tarell Alvin McCraney
executive producer: Marilyn Sanchez, Josh Miller, Teresa Irene, Andrew Hevia
producer: Lucas Leyva, Yara Travieso, Jonathan David Kane
co-producer: Iain McCray Martin
cast: Anthony Arias, James Randolph, Teo Castellanos, Nakeithya Smith, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Luis Cuevas, Staci Lyon, Sandy Santon, Juana Santon and family, Shaveila Lynch and family
assistant director: Carlos Rivera
director of photography: Daniel Fernandez
assistant camera: Joey Daoud
2nd assistant camera: Jeff Harper, Andrew Hevia
steadicam operator: Dan T. Earl
production coordinator: Jamil Gonzalez
assistant production coordinator: Jose Bota
gaffer: Miguel Porto
key grip: Francis Mingo
art direction: Catherine Garcia-Menocal, Yara Travieso
wardrobe: Jennifer Figueroa
casting: Fab C.
production assistants: Daniel Rosenberg, David Tamargo
sound: Cory Czajkowski, Matt Stayton
editor: Lucas Leyva
post supervision: Matthew Berkowitz
craft services: Jillian Mayer
original score: Jared McKay, John Hancock, Brian Robertson
additional music: Dunn, Matamoros, Barge
Tarell Alvin McCraney, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" is a playwright exploring the rich diversity of the African American experience in works that imbue the lives of ordinary people with epic significance. Complementing his poetic, intimate language with a musical sensibility and rhythmic, often ritualistic movement, McCraney transforms intentionally minimalist stages into worlds marked by metaphor and imagery.
His most well-known works, a triptych collectively titled The Brother/Sister Plays (2009), weave West African Yoruban cosmology into modern-day stories of familial self-sacrifice, unrequited love, and coming of age. The audience becomes an essential part of the story as the characters speak their stage directions and inner feelings directly to the viewers. In Head of Passes (2013) and Choir Boy (2012), McCraney draws on themes that run throughout the Book of Job and traditional spirituals, respectively, to explore the role of faith and tradition in two very different close-knit worlds. Head of Passes, set in the isolated marshlands of the Mississippi River Delta, dramatizes a matriarch’s struggle to maintain her faith as her world literally falls apart around her. In Choir Boy, students at an elite boarding school remain united in their dedication to performing traditional spirituals even as they navigate the fraught nature of adolescent self-expression.
In addition to writing new works, McCraney is committed to bringing theatre to elementary and secondary school students, particularly in underserved communities in his hometown of Miami. His ninety-minute adaptation of Hamlet (2010), an intense, condensed version of the play set within a contemporized historical context, employs a visually explosive, expressive staging that engages audiences of all ages, whether or not they have a previous familiarity with Shakespeare. In telling stories that are simultaneously contemporary and universal, McCraney is demonstrating to new and younger audiences the ability of theatre to evoke a sense of our shared humanity and emerging as an important voice in American theatre.
Tarell McCraney received a B.F.A. (2003) from DePaul University and an M.F.A. (2007) from Yale University. He was the International Writer in Residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2008–2010), where he remains an associate artist, and a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University (2009) before becoming an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2010. He is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and a member of Teo Castellanos D-Projects in Miami. His additional plays include Wig Out! (2008) and American Trade (2011), and his works have been performed at such venues as the Public Theater, the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University, the Young Vic (London), and Steppenwolf Theatre.
Mayer\Leyva is performance artist Jillian Mayer and retired playwright Lucas Leyva. Their collaborations include short films, art installations, music videos, experimental theater, and web projects.
Their last two short films (Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke; #PostModem) premiered at Sundance and went on to play AFI, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Winterthur, New Zealand and festivals all over the world. In 2012 four separate Mayer\Leyva projects were screened at SXSW and in 2013 they returned with another.
Named to Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces of Independent Film” list, their projects have also screened at museums worldwide including MoMA, Guggenheim Museums, New Orleans Contemporary and the permanent collection of the Miami Art Museum. This year they were selected for the New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship at the Sundance Institute.
Their music videos have been featured by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vice, Stereogum, and NME and have been named to various year-end Top10 video lists, including IFC.
They have made three viral videos, including I Am Your Grandma, which became an unlikely sensation that has been spoofed on various TV shows and was featured on the cover of Art Papers Magazine, and the controversial Jacuzzi Boys: Glazin’ which became infamous after getting over 600,000 views in 48 hours before being banned from YouTube permanently and becoming the subject of a SXSW Panel.
They have been awarded grants from the Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban-American Artists, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Elsewhere Museum/ National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Harpo Foundation, the Zentrum Paul Klee Museum Fellowship (Switzerland), and the South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship.
Together they help run the Borscht Corporation and the Borscht Film Festival in Miami, where they work and live with Shivers, their wise and benevolent miniature chihuahua.
website: mayerleyva.com