Early Saturday morning I drove across Interstate 10 into Phoenix, Arizona to attend the Arizona Black Film Showcase. My short film INVISIBLE SCREAM was being screened there. It was a 5 hour trip with a landscape that would make your soul drop, TWO TIMES! The desert is an amazingly beautiful terrain. Cactus, Joshua Trees, tumbleweed and dry red mountains that leave your lungs arid and angry, but their momentousness has you reveling in how greatly created this earth.

I found Phoenix to be an extremely clean and new city. Lots of clean people with clean haircuts walking down clean streets with a backdrop of clean air [it actually rained after a 130-day dry period].

Now about the clean film festival. During the screening of my film the audience was with it, laughing, screaming... that is until the main character [a black man] falls and the serial killer [a white man] gets the upper hand. When that happened their tone changed to vocal disappointment. Which is fine. I don't expect every audience member to embrace the whys and hows of my socially-charged short horror film. But I do expect respect. After the screening, the moderator of my film talk back announced there would be no post-discussion. Then after I shouted that I was there, he brought me down to the front and attempted to reprimand me for not registering [which was a lie], then after that he asked for my name in this "let's get this over with" tone. All of this over a booming microphone. Talk about embarrassing, talk about feeling unwelcomed by your own people. After a series of questions ranging from "why did you let the black man fall?" and "what was the significance of the cicadas?", I thought Why is this moderator not participating in giving context to me as an artist and a fellow black filmmaker. Why is he letting the audience throw daggers [not all of them, but definitely enough of them]? Then I thought: Maybe because my film was not neat enough, not clean enough. It was a bit too dirty for Phoenix. They need simple and clean.

Needless to say, I was feeling a little disappointed in the cleanliness of Phoenix. Then I met Kathy Singer.

The following day I walked into a "Southwest" novelty store in the Arizona Center with my traveling companions Tamika and Jimmie. Kathy, the store's owner, walked up to us and I immediately sensed something pleasantly urgent behind her eyes. From her heart. She smoked [which you don't expect to see in Phoenix]. And her voice was loudly raspy with a history of difficult experience and harsh realities. Then she just... unfolded her life before us. She was born in Florida. Her two children were kidnapped from her when they were toddlers. One was taken to Yemen. Fifteen years ago she finally located her son in Yemen, and recently went there for a visit and told us the most amazing story of a people who beamed with clumsy and honest humanity. I tell you, Kathy was a stand out. She reminded me that amidst an arid, dry and clean environment, there is always life, ready and willing to be thorny and bruised. Kathy lost her children, found them, went to Yemen and seemed to have be revived by the possibility of humanity. When she talked to us, I felt like I was participating in a conversation, a real and genuine exchange of not so clean ideas and a not so clean life. And, oh, how I so needed that.

Until next time,

Keith