First Time Filmmakers Block 1
ON AIR
Single & Thriving...Kind Of
Through Cass, the show explores the pressures of time, the distorted standards of social media, and the weight of systemic racism in corporate America, all while shining a light on how these forces impact Black love and the mental and emotional well-being of young Black men and women. But it’s not all heavy—this is a show that celebrates Black joy, Black love, and Black friendship. With wit, humor, nostalgia and plenty of heart, Single & Thriving... Kind Of offers a refreshing, authentic look at what it means to truly grow into yourself while thriving and struggling at the same damn time!
Pandaal
Discovering Bessie Coleman 0:15
Somewhere In Brooklyn
Unknown Caller
During a violent storm at 4:25 AM, Maya receives a wrong-number call from Neal, someone in crisis contemplating suicide. What begins as a misdirected call to a suicide hotline becomes a profound conversation between two souls in pain.
Through a 2-hour conversation, Maya shares her story of loss while helping Neal find reasons to live. In saving Neal, Maya begins her own journey toward healing.
As Maya shares her story of loss and regret, she unknowingly saves Neal's life while beginning to heal her own. The film explores how helping others can be the path to healing ourselves.
Explores Maya’s complex journey of parental grief and finding purpose in pain.
Black & Blue
Set against the pulse of live jazz, the film explores how love and ambition can move in harmony and still fall out of sync, and what it means to choose yourself when timing refuses to cooperate. Intimate, musical, and emotionally honest, Black & Blue is about the people who shape us, the dreams that pull us apart, and the songs that stay long after the night ends.
Wi Cyah Stay
The Baltimore Barber
Seventeen-year-old Scooter is one of Anthony’s favorites. Bright, ambitious, and full of plans. Scooter talks about opening a bike shop, going viral, buying his mother a house, and building a safer life for his family as Anthony trims his hair and offers fatherly guidance.
Intercut with these moments is a second, colder ritual: Anthony working late at night in an undisclosed location, carefully laying out tools and tufts of hair, performing the same precise motions we see in the shop, but under far different circumstances.
As Scooter speaks passionately about the life he intends to build, the film slowly reveals a shattering truth: Anthony is not only the barber shaping his community’s future, he is also the man preparing its dead. Scooter, whose voice fills the shop with hope, is already gone.
The Baltimore Barber is a haunting meditation on grief, gun violence, and the quiet labor of the men who hold Black communities together. It questions what it costs to keep showing up in a world that keeps taking your kids, and who takes care of the care taker?
I'll Try to Explain it
Lost in Spice
Through this film, I wanted to explore the theme of anger not as a raw explosion, but as a profound reaction to the invisible tensions that shape us. The main character's anger stems from social pressure, the desire to conform and please at all costs, to the point of losing control of his own choices. Pushed to his limits, he undergoes an intense physical and emotional experience where every fall, every movement, becomes a way of expressing this inner struggle. In the ordeal, he discovers that this anger can also be a force for growth, allowing him to reconnect with himself and regain control of his life.
A Moment in Time
Haunted by a past she has never fully faced, a driven woman is forced to confront the grief she has carried for years before it consumes the life she has built.
In her directorial debut, actor and producer Tara Troy draws from her personal experiences of loss and survival—including a cancer diagnosis and the death of her father—to tell a deeply human story about grief, forgiveness, and the conversations we wish we had before time runs out.
