Screenings for Disparate City

Disparate City has now had two screenings, one at the culminating event of arts organization CentroNía‘s summer programs, and the other at the Deanwood X Design arts festival.

August 18, 2012 | Categories: Academic Projects, Disparate City, Screenwriting, Directing, Producing | Leave A Comment »

The Official Press Release for Disparate City

For Immediate Release

Contact: Jonah Best, Writer/Director
Cell Phone: 202.294.9008
Email: Jonah.L.Best@gmail.com
Website: JonahBest.com

Promotional Images
Trailer
Full Film

“Disparate City” Short Film Release

Local Filmmaker Addresses Social Issues in DC

“Disparate City” is a short film exploring cultural tension in DC created by gentrification, segregation, and prejudice, as well as the benefits of tolerance and understanding for District residents.

The filmmaker, Jonah Best, was born and raised in the Northeast DC neighborhood of Brookland. Attending predominantly minority DC public schools throughout his education, he was the only white male in his class upon graduating from Capital City Public Charter School this year. Immersed in the city’s Black and Latino cultures, Best held a unique perspective on the city, which informed his writing for this film. The film was Best’s Senior Expedition at CCPCS, a research and outreach project the school requires for graduating seniors which helps the community and relates to students’ career interests.

Drawing inspiration from George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy, and the filmmaker’s own experiences, the film uses the relationships between its young central characters to illustrate culture and communicate its messages about larger social structures. The protagonist, Eduardo, is a native of DC’s diverse Columbia Heights community displaced to Northeast by the neighborhood’s gentrification, giving him first-hand experience with DC’s more troubling social issues. The other starring role is Luz, who just moved to the affluent, transient, popular DC neighborhood Dupont Circle. She does not understand the city behind the politics and desperately wants to leave what she sees as a temporary home. The film follows their tense yet growing friendship and their decisions about where to go and what to do after high school.

To ensure the film’s characters, their biases, and the overall plot were true to the experience of DC residents, the writer conducted about twenty interviews of high school students and several of adults from all across the city. They expressed opinions and prejudices they held or perceived about the various regions of the city, from west of Rock Creek Park, to uptown, to Northeast, and east of the river.

The filmmaker is looking to reach a wider audience for the film, to spread its message, and to open a dialogue in the community. To start, he’s looking for local news outlets, newspapers, and blogs interested in giving the film exposure online. The arts organization CentroNia will screened the film on August 2nd in Columbia Heights, and Deanwood X Design will screen it August 10th in Deanwood. The filmmaker is pursuing further venues for screenings in July and August. The film’s trailer is available on YouTube:

along with the full length film:

Best wrote, directed, shot, and edited the film, and he cast the film entirely with unknowns, fellow students interested in acting. The lead actor, Nelson Cruz, had never acted before. The film was shot on the popular indie filmmaker tool set, a full high-definition DSLR camera on a small, sturdy shoulder mount and steadicam rig. The film was edited using Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe After Effects CS5.5. The main crew consisted only of Best and his four actors. The adults associated with the project only oversaw its writing and distribution. Teachers at Capital City supervised the character and contextual research, professional screenwriter and UCLA alumnus Paige MacDonald advised the last three drafts of the script, and also documentary filmmaker Ellie Walton, new media content creator Kelli Anderson, and Kimberly Gaines, director of CentroNia’s Studio 64 youth program, advised the distribution of the film.

Never having received formal training, Best learned his filmmaking skills from books, documentaries, his various employers and mentors, and mostly from practicing the craft on his own time. He entered the realm of professional filmmaking at fifteen, and now at eightteen, he is moving to Manhattan to study film and television production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has worked as an editor, graphic designer, animator, and assistant on set for social justice documentary filmmaker Ellie Walton, who was featured in a Washington Post article about her work in the DC community. He created multiple short films for performances at Columbia Heights’ GALA Hispanic Theatre, taught video editing at CentroNia — a charter school and arts center in the neighborhood — and traveled to Borlänge, Sweden to create a variety of media, including promotional films, short documentaries, and music videos for the Peace and Love music festival in 2011.

Best was the valedictorian of Capital City PCS’s class of 2012. That class, the school’s first, had only thirty-nine graduates, all of which are college bound this fall. Eighty percent of the class will be the first in their families to go to college, and eight students will also be the first to graduate high school. This diverse and successful group of students attracted some media attention at the graduation ceremony.

At NYU, Best was selected to be a Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar, one of approximately 75 students per year chosen to participate in an immersive social justice program while studying at the university, and one of approximately 150 students in the entire NYU class of 2016 to receive a merit-based scholarship award.

“Disparate City,” through both its story and its place in his career, represents the beginning of Best’s process to leave home, making it not only the most ambitious film of his career so far, but also the most meaningful story.

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July 24, 2012 | Categories: Academic Projects, Disparate City, Screenwriting, Directing, Producing | Leave A Comment »