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about vincent
There's a version of this story that starts with a single mother doing it alone, a father who was never there to begin with, and a rented VHS tape of a film about a group of friends growing up in South Central Los Angeles. It always starts there. Something about that film, playing late in a dark room one particular night, cracked something open that never quite closed back up.Later that same night came a visit from something, or someone, hard to say which even now. What followed was a declaration, spoken out loud the next morning like it had been waiting its turn. Thirty-five years of making films on almost nothing trace back to that one morning. Film school came somewhere in those years, in three different places, never in a straight line, the way most real educations aren't. A trip to Italy changed the way the world looked afterward, the kind of trip that rearranges something behind your eyes without asking permission first. Along the way came the lessons no textbook ever bothers to teach, about festivals, about crews, about what actually keeps a set from falling apart when nobody's watching.One film found its way into the NYC Horror Film Festival, and traveled from there all the way to Salerno, Italy. Another got made inside an abandoned house, walls that had forgotten what a working light switch felt like. One turned into a music video about chasing a dream and refusing to let a single thing stand in the way of it. Another became a documentary about learning to look closer at what was already sitting right there the whole time. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, a panel at a comic convention, talking nano budget filmmaking with whoever pulled up a chair.None of it came with a safety net. No backup plan tucked away somewhere, nobody standing off to the side asking what happens if this doesn't work out. Failure showed up more than once, and every time it did, it left a little more resilience behind than it took. There's a certain moment, when somebody makes a declaration like that out loud, plainly, no hedging in it anywhere, and everyone in earshot just knows, without being told, that nothing is going to talk that person out of what they've already decided to chase.That's the moment all of this comes from.