My love of film began on Saturday afternoons at the Melba, a neighborhood theater in Baychester, in the Northeast Bronx. Those Saturdays were filled with Blaxploitation films, an ethnic subgenre, small scraps from Hollywood’s table for an audience that was never fully valued. Yet those films filled the screen with people who looked like me, and that mattered. I didn’t need American Graffiti; I had Cooley High. It was a story I could relate to as a Black, inner-city kid, one that allowed me to imagine my own high school years being as full of possibility and joy as Preach and Cochise’s.

By the time I entered high school in the 1980s, those films had largely disappeared. Where once there were complete Black stories, I was now expected to accept Black characters in minor roles or, if we were lucky, as the comedic sidekick. Occasionally, a film featured a Black lead, but it rarely filled the void left behind.

Today, my country is deeply divided. The governing party is actively erasing my history, banning novels by Toni Morrison and other authors of color. Progress has stalled, and in many ways, we are moving backward. That is why it is more important than ever to continue to tell stories from different perspectives that reach audiences with little exposure to Black culture and offer them a broader, richer spectrum of experience. There is nothing more powerful than a good story. Protests against inequality have their place, but stories endure even when they try to ban them. They last for centuries and cannot be erased. A strong, character-driven narrative will always find its audience.

With more platforms than ever to watch films, now is the perfect moment for a new wave of Black cinema to flood the cultural landscape. Like Melvin van Peebles and Gordon Parks did for me, I want to spark the imagination of a new generation of Black moviegoers and inspire future Black filmmakers, while also offering those with limited exposure to Black life a window into Black storytelling.

To that end, I founded Cool Oz Productions, a Brooklyn-based film production company dedicated to developing character-driven sci-fi and suspense films rooted in Black folklore against an urban backdrop. We are currently developing our first feature, Gabriel’s Horn. As its writer, I envisioned a Black Heaven, one where all its occupants are Black and an archangel who, struggling with his faith, abandons Heaven in search of a new foundation. In parts of this country, portraying Heaven as Black is considered blasphemous, no matter how thoughtfully realized. But for the kid who grew up in Baychester, it fulfills a promise he made to himself more than forty years ago, sitting in a darkened theater on countless Saturday afternoons.