this award-winning teen filmmaker isn’t afraid of anything

It’s probably hard for a lot of filmgoers to imagine that a high school student could write and direct a debut feature film as confident, as deep, and as powerful as this year’s award-winningAfter all, auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were nearly finished with their twenties when they made their stunning debuts — Terence Malik was 30. But having met director, who’s now 19, I can attest that when it comes to creative maturity and intention, age ain’t nothing but a number.

Although he wrote the film when he was 17, his youth spent in the black churches of the Bible Belt gave him more than enough fodder for the film. Through vivid imagery, naturalistic storytelling, and poetic editing,thrusts us into the lives of a small black community bound by a Christian faith that fails to provide any answers for their pain. Church-going matriarch Helen lives alone, except for her beloved dog, who is suffering hopelessly from an unconquerable case of mange.

During our conversation, Youmans talked to me a lot about responsibility, which is pretty atypical for young adult, but that is kind of his M.O. He openly pondered what it means to tell a story about religion as someone who’s not religious, or to present flawed black characters in a medium that historically demonizes black people. Of course, we didn’t get to the bottom of these questions. We couldn’t.

The portrayal of your characters is pretty raw. They’re not bad people, but they’re not exactly good either. How do you navigate the representation of blackness as a young black filmmaker? It is important for us as black people to showcase ourselves in an honest, nuanced, fallible light. But I do think that sort of fallibility needs to come from a black filmmaker and a black perspective. Otherwise, it can turn into demonizing when it’s done as a caricature.My biggest fear was with the church. Some people could say what we did was sacrilege since we filmed it in a church with real churchgoing people who we represented in a fallible light.

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