
Quickly becoming New York City’s newest “power couple” the husband-and-wife team collaborate on every project together, from inception to presentation! Their first web series, “Mr. and Mrs. Jackson”, was produced and co-directed by the pair and won multiple awards including Best costume design (Hip-Hop FilmFestival 2019) ironically the same year they launched their trendy women’s streetwear clothing line“Trendstar NYC”. Their latest project Black Privilege. White Power. received a 7.5 on the Blacklist (2019)in Hollywood and is gaining recognition throughout the industry.
Tell us about your experience at the Hip Hop Film Festival? So this year was even better than our first year, which was 2019. Our web series won for Best Costume. Before I talk about this year's festival I want to point out that we met a young brother named Darryn Smith who was a volunteer at the festival in 2019. I noticed his drive right away. We stayed in touch and we were able to hire him at a number of our events as a photographer/videographer. Including at our wedding in Central Park as well as our clothing line launch at Harlem Fashion Week just before the pandemic. We hired him as an AD for our short film BLACK PRIVILEGE. WHITE POWER. We took him and a small crew down to Greenwood MS to film. He did a tremendous job while working with us. Our experience this year was awesome, our schedules didn't allow us to view as many projects as we would have liked to and I couldn't figure out how to move my avatar through the metaverse but I was in a few chat rooms and did get to connect with some really cool people! The BEST thing that happened though was winning a GOLDEN TICKET at the Boss Pitch event!
Why are stories from the culture important? I believe that we can't know where we are to head if we don't know from whence we came! Systemically our people have been de-programmed and then re-programmed in such a way that really cripples our culture as well as our future! The one thing that makes our culture so beautiful is that no matter how hard they try they just can't destroy it and... as a matter of fact... the harder they try to destroy the culture the more it grows and the more it grows, the more inviting it becomes!
What projects are you working on now? We have an amazing writer Kate Lanier (What's Love Got to Do with it/Set it off) who is finishing up the first draft of the re-write for our feature length film. We are super excited about that as we have a couple of producers interested in the script as well as a good team of filmmakers and are prepared to take the project to the next level so now we are in fundraising mode!
Why do you think the Harlem Film House and Hip Hop Film Festival are important? These two entities are so vital because they are directly connected to the essence of the community! Most of us know that it is our community that sets the trends for the entire world, then the other folks take it and monetize it because they have the money and the industry control/outlets. But... they cannot move forward without our creativity, which for us comes so easily! Hip-Hop FF and Harlem Filmhouse are the community hubs that breed the best of the culture. For us if not having been given the opportunities that we ve gotten from these two entities our journey would have been sufficiently longer! It's already a LOOOONG journey but the opportunity we received to pitch to the gatekeepers was something that no amount of money can buy and our preparation will speak for itself in that meeting!
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