Kevin Brooks & Lawrence Matthews

Ever since he was 6 years old Kevin Brooks has wanted to make films.

“My dad brought home a camera and I started running around the house filming random things. Then me and my friends started recreating films that we loved — little Star Wars scenes, scenes from Pulp Fiction — which we were probably too young to even watch. That’s where it all started. I love telling stories with cameras, and creating a community of people that way.”

While Brooks was a student at the University of Memphis, he was selected for a Sundance Ignite fellowship, a program to introduce the most promising filmmakers in the world to the Hollywood elite. That was around the time artist, musician, and aspiring filmmaker Lawrence Matthews met him. Matthews pitched a TV show idea to producer/director Morgan Jon Fox, who recommended he meet with Brooks.

“I was sitting in Otherlands, nervous, thinking I was going to be pitching this Millennial show, with all these Millennial problems to an old man. He’s not going to get any of these references. Then Kevin walks in and I was like, ‘Yes! He’s young and black!’”

Since that first meeting, the pair has had a fruitful partnership. Mathews starred in Brooks’ short film Myles, and they collaborated on two epic videos for Matthews’ musical alter ego, Don Lifted.

Due to entrenched institutional racism, black writers and directors have long been shut out of Hollywood. But Brooks says the 2017 Oscar Best Picture win for Moonlight, the first ever for a film with an all-black cast, gives him hope.

“This stuff that’s going on now in Hollywood, with black people, it’s totally changing. I want to tell stories that are not your average black movie. When I was a kid, I was watching films by Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. I’ve always wanted to tell more artful stories within the black community, and that’s the whole renaissance that’s taking place.”

Matthews says long-held industry assumptions are crumbling. “Right now, Hollywood reminds me of the 1990s, when we had a plethora of TV shows because the executives realized that black TV shows drove more engagement. Now, it seems like they understand that when you put proper energy into black projects and black creators, you end up with Get Out and Black Panther. That’s a thing that Hollywood said was impossible. ‘Black people don’t do well internationally,’ they say. ‘They don’t do well as leads.’ But these films have proved Hollywood wrong, and because of that, it’s opening the floodgates for people. You can’t say anymore that it’s not possible.”

Both artists say that, as black kids growing up in Memphis, their parents made sure they were aware of the legacy of the great civil rights leaders. “My grandmother really instilled it in me,” Brooks says. “She would pick me up from school all the time and drill it into me, about Malcolm X and Dr. King. My school didn’t really go deep into it — I went to a Catholic private school — but my family really instilled it in me.”

Matthews says his father would start off the day by playing recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches. “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about him. My dad always had pictures of Martin Luther King in the house. My brother, who came later, was named Martin Malcolm, after Dr. King and Malcolm X.

Last summer, Matthews was doing photography workshops at the Carpenter Art Garden in Binghampton when he started hearing of black families being forced out by gentrification. “I heard about all the things these kids were going through, and I thought, I can’t make visual art about this. I can’t sing about this. This needs to be a film. There’s a bigger thing happening here that I need to document. If no one knows about it, things won’t change. People’s lives are being affected for generations, because other people are making decisions for them that are not for them.”

At 23, Brooks is the youngest person ever to be on the board of the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission. His films Bonfire and Queendom Come screened at Crosstown Arts in March. “You have to tell stories that are going to push society forward, in a way. That’s a big undertaking. Not every film I make is going to be huge and change people. But I want to have that as a base level. Even the short film I just finished, which is about love and heartbreak, I hope it helps people heal the same way it helped me heal when I was making it. Everything I make, I put myself into it, hoping to connect with people. I feel like it’s a lot of responsibility. Younger kids are looking up to you, thinking, He’s a Memphis filmmaker. If he can do it, I can do it.”

Matthews says he sees increased opportunities for black creatives in Memphis’ future. “I think it’s definitely better to be a black artist in Memphis now than it was when I was in high school. I think it took Midtown and Downtown creating these spaces for people to create freely. Before, if you weren’t connected, you were out of it. There wasn’t this kind of infrastructure, at least in my experience, to provide alternative ways to get your creativity out. Now there are outlets for people like me. I’m not signed to a label, I’m not represented by a gallery, I don’t have an agent. But I’m still able to do work and get paid for that world. If we do our job, there will be more of us in the future.”