films
I make nonfiction shorts. Here are a few of the things I've made, with captions explaining why I made them.
Local Monuments is a short I made about my home town of Columbia, Missouri. It's a film about nostalgia, and how complicated things can get when your memories about a place chafe against that place's actual history.
The short has screened at the BFI Future Film Festival in London, where it won "Best International Short."
It was produced with the help of the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri, and executive produced by Stacey Woelfel and Robert Greene.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Association of Black Graduate and Professional Students at the University of Missouri, and to Charlie Lyne and Andrew Droz Palermo for their advice.
Watch this space for news about future screenings of the film.
Birder, Birdwatcher is a short I made in the spring of 2016, driven by my love of birds, and also bird-watchers.
The short is about Lori Turner and Bill Mees. They are two very different people, brought together by their shared love of bird-watching.
The film screened in August of 2016 at the Friends of Reston Summer Shorts Film Festival in Reston, Virginia.
Marcus Wallace: An Elicitation started as an assignment for a photojournalism course I took at the University of Missouri in the spring of 2016.
The Missouri Wildflowers Nursery in Brazito is one of my favorite places in the world.
Marcus Wallace has worked at the nursery which his dad founded since he was a kid. In this short, he reflects back on his childhood, and everything that has changed since then.
I stared at the sun was my first, unsteady foray into using experimental images in my filmmaking, also completed in the Spring of 2016.
I am near-sighted and I love art. That's why I decided to make this short about near-sightedness and art. The artist I interviewed for this is Matt Ballou, a professor at the University of Missouri. You can find his art here: https://eikonktizo.wordpress.com/
Saving the Migration was the first documentary short film I ever completed, and what made me decide to pursue filmmaking as a career.
In the summer of 2015, the U.S. saw a massive national effort to restore habitat for the monarch butterfly, after its migrating population crashed.
I made this short for Newsy.com about the crisis, and the ensuing restoration effort.