World We Dare to Imagine: Part 1

It took me quite a lot of thought to figure out how I might be able to use my education to make a difference in the world. When regular people think of the entertainment industry, they usually think of it as merely entertainment, or just something to do with an empty hour or two. Many of the business people in the entertainment industry think of movies only as a commodity to be sold and think of the artists that make them as obstacles to be navigated around or cajoled into submission. Movies are distributed with little regard to the profound emotional and cultural effects that they have upon the audiences that watch them, the audience is reduced to rows of theater seats filled with dollar signs. But movies are so much more than that! Like it or not, movies are a form of art, and they carry the same impact as all other art forms.

I believe that art is about: the artist taking a piece of their soul, creating a work of art that reflects that piece of their soul, and then every individual member of the audience seeing their own soul reflected in that work and having that part of themselves be revealed. What people don't realize is that behind every movie is a collection of artists who have constructed that story from pieces of their unique experiences. Whether they want to or not, they put their soul into every frame of the film. Ultimately this reflection of the artist’s soul is what the audience sees and connects with because it reflects their own experiences and struggles. This connection is what makes film-making such a beautiful art form.

But when the only artists that are hired to make movies all have the same experiences and continue to tell the same story over and over again, minorities in the audience see the film and don’t see their soul reflected. It’s a crushing experience for them. It feels like they don’t belong and are all alone in their struggle. And that is why diversity within the film industry is so vital. I feel like I should disclose that I am a cisgender, straight, white, male. Some people might say that I have no place to talk about diversity and inclusion because of these facts, but I believe that this issue is much larger than me, and that no matter what we're all going to have to work together to figure out a way to solve these issues regardless of sexual identity, gender identity, or race.

I think the main problem I've noticed with the current Hollywood system is that even though there is an increased awareness of the lack of diversity in Hollywood, I feel that there is a continued lack of systems in place to help foster and nurture this diversity at the source. Very recently, Hollywood executives have seen the attendance numbers beginning to negatively shift due to push back from neglected groups and have started aggressively pursuing diversity for all the wrong reasons. As a result, they have failed to build and foster the voice of minority filmmakers, instead opting to set diversity hiring quotas and shoehorn minority filmmakers into stale ready-made projects, rather than giving them the opportunities and training to tell the new stories that they long to share.

The United States' diversity is what makes it so special, yet many cultures continue to be neglected within Hollywood, and because of this their stories are lost and unknown within our culture. The American Dream is like a tapestry that all Americans weave together. My dream is to find a way to give everyone the needles and thread that they need to weave their unique stories into the fabric to make the tapestry finally reflect the diversity that is inherent in our population within our national identity. Ultimately, what I’d like to do is make a program that takes young minority filmmakers and teaches them how to find their own unique voice, and then gives them the funding that they need to tell their own unique stories so that every culture within the United States can see itself and its stories reflected within our culture.