THE STAR BEHIND THE CAMERA

UNDER OVERCAST skies, on a two-way road through lush, green fields, a BMW swerves out of its lane. In the driver’s seat is a haggard, middle-aged preacher who smokes and sips from a flask as the radio blares details of a woman’s murder. A man of the cloth with the walls closing in.

This is Phillip Youmans’s favorite scene in a film he wrote and directed over the course of two years, starting while he was still in high school. It stars alum Wendell Pierce, earned an award as the best narrative feature at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 (when Youmans was all of 19 years old), and impressed Ava DuVernay enough that her production company, Array, helped distribute the film and bring it to Netflix.