The completion of a creative project, film and documentary film particularly, is a blurry line at best. In order to understand when indeed you are finished, you often have to ask yourself why you started in the first place and if you’re lucky not too much time has elapsed between both sides and by some magic, you do remember why you started. I still remember that conversation with Wilson in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, but of course the inspiration is deeper. The reason for this film is, I believe, a need to claim something for oneself, to claim some beauty as, first my own, and second, to claim it for the Black people before and after me.

Beauty is a profitable business, and I don’t just mean financially, I mean in cultural capital as well, and for too long, we the other people have been left out of the conversation. We have been eliminated under several assumptions, the least of them not being that there is simply nothing beautiful we can offer. On that note I dare you to look at anything by Benny Andrews and not need a moment to hold on to that beauty. Beyond the Black is beautiful cliche is the truth behind that desire to connect oneself with beautiful things, because if we can understand that we are more, collectively, than what we are so often told, or shown, then we can be stirred to action.

There is truth in the assertion that Black people in America need more togetherness in action, and I don’t mean the oft-repeated politics of showing up for the cameras (I will stay away from naming names as this is not really about politics), but I mean social action brought on by earnest conversation with each other. Social action is not solely pickets and placards, it is educating yourself on the right candidate for presidency, it is curiosity on the nature of your local communities, it is a desire to be part of the future of something great.

I will not pretend that our film is all these things, that would be arrogant, not to mention wrong. But what Colored Frames does do to address a lot of these points, is show you beauty as it lives, capital ‘b,’ as created by Black artists with a natural talent that deserves better than stereotyping, a talent that deserves the space to grow, breathe, evolve into a spectacular future we will all enjoy arriving at, a universal future.