This Miami filmmaker tackles mental health and the Black community in documentary
There’s a calmness to filmmaker Antwon Lindsey’s voice when he talks about growing up in Liberty City, describing how his childhood in Miami’s historically Black neighborhood molded him.
“It shaped my art because it allowed me to somewhat see how I wanted to transform my life,” he said. “I dealt with a lot of close friends being killed and gun violence. And I always knew that I had a different path, and so I just decided to take a different route.”
But growing up in Liberty City, Lindsey, 32, said it was unpopular to be into the arts. “It wasn’t the masculine persona that you got into,” he said. “If you’re in the arts, then you’re weird or something’s wrong with you,” he said, adding that it was often expected that you’d be into sports or in the streets.
Lindsey, who now lives in Fort Myers but is frequently back and forth to South Florida, recalls with excitement how working on his first film with a fraternity brother brought him back to his neighborhood.
“We shot that film on the street where I grew up in Liberty City in my grandmother’s old home,” he said, adding it was not far from where “Moonlight” was filmed. “It was just like a dream come true. How many people get to do something like this?”
His latest film, a documentary titled “HUSH,” focuses on mental health in the Black community and what is being done to help manage mental health issues.
“One of the things that we don’t realize is that in the Black community in general, there are a lot of unhealthy habits that get passed down for generations and it seems especially in more impoverished communities,” said Lindsey, who also works as a biology teacher and self funds his projects.
Exploring mental health was personal for Lindsey, who lost a cousin to suicide when in 2012. “I didn’t think black people committed suicide, and we were a year apart,” he said, reflecting on that time in his life.
For Lindsey, “HUSH” was also an opportunity to answer questions he had about his own mental health journey and hopefully help others, adding that journaling and practicing Buddhism have helped keep him centered.
The film, which spans an hour and 15 minutes, takes viewers on a historical journey of Black trauma, beginning with mental health experts and historians discussing slavery and the lasting effects that has had on Black people, the disintegration of families, negative experiences Black people experience with law enforcement, discrimination in the workplace and voter disenfranchisement.
Throughout the film, experts chronicle the challenges Black people face when confronting their trauma, the fear of going to therapy and what doing so could do for their mental health. The film also discusses how Black people can identify their trauma and what they can do to address it.
Mental health and film
“HUSH” isn’t Lindsey’s first film to explore mental health in the Black community.
In 2019 he created his first feature film, “Reticent,” based on his first book of the same name, which focuses on a Black man dealing with depression and anxiety in the inner city. Both the book and the film were a way of reckoning with his cousin’s death by suicide and with the help of a friend Lindsey screened the film at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California to a crowd of about 300 people.
“I’m like, yeah, this is what I want to do,” he said, thinking back on that moment. “This is what I want to do, always.”
It’s also why Lindsey, a graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University, skipped getting his doctorate and decided to focus on making “HUSH” to further explore mental health issues.
“I’m always looking to seek the answers within myself, and that’s what continued to help push me and drove me through this process,” he said.
“HUSH” is the second film produced by Lindsey under his A38 film company, founded in 2019. The company also produced “Colour of Love,” which he created based on a poem he wrote that he described as being inspired by the movie “Love Jones.”
“I wanted to give my generation something to just kind of enjoy from that era, and just the idea of love and relationships,” he said.
Lindsey said his next film will focus on Black fatherhood, what it means and what it looks like. “There are all of these different facets with that idea. I can’t wait because as a Black father, it incorporates some of the questions that I still have, some of the knowledge that I was able to gain,” he said. “It’s going to be very entertaining, educational and empowering for people, especially Black men.”
“HUSH” is available for rent on at A38 Films website.
This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 10:58 AM.
