During the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Macro held a screening and Q & A for the Oscar nominated animated short film Hair Love with its director Matthew A. Cherry and producer Karen R. Toliver in attendance.
The six minute critically-acclaimed animated short film centered on the relationship between an African-American father, his daughter and her hair.
Cherry is a former NFL player who has made a successful transition to the film world as a producer and director. Not only has he directed music videos and TV episodes, but he also a feature film called The Last Fall that starred Lance Gross and Nicole Beharie.
Blackfilm.com caught up with Cherry at Sundance to discuss his Oscar nomination and film.
This has been a long time coming. How excited were you when you saw your name announced?
Matthew A. Cherry: It was insane. We watched it live at the house. We had the whole team over. Isa Rae was hosting it and actually announced our category. So that was like really full circle as well. It was just joy. For me, being a former athlete, like you always set the goal at the highest level. And you know, I think the film community, the Oscars, represents the highest level of achievement and to finally be recognized for something is just insane. Sometimes you just never know what will ever happen.
Animation takes longer to do than a feature film. How long had it been from the start of making this movie to the nomination?
Matthew A. Cherry: About two years. We did the Kickstarter in July 2017. It was about a year and eight or nine months of development. We finished the movie end of July last year. Yeah, it’s been a crazy journey.
Compared to last year when there was over 10 Black nominees, this year only has five, including yourself and your producing partner Karen R. Toliver. How does that make you feel, knowing the rare company you are in?
Matthew A. Cherry: It’s definitely obviously bittersweet. Just because you would hope that something like this would happen in a year that was better representation. It is tricky, because with the Oscars, especially in the Grammys, too. So it’s kind of like this ebb and flow. Like some years we have, like last year with Black Panther, we had so many Black nominees, and this year, there’s not as many and I just think that we just had to keep working. The thing about the Academy is, it seems like they rarely recognized first time filmmakers. So I think we have to just kind of keep getting our stories out there. We need more executives that are in the business; and just people at all levels that really just understand the great work that’s being done because the work is there. Filmmakers Lulu Wang, Chinonye Chukwu, Mati Diop, Joe Talbot and on and on, there’s incredible work that’s being done. I could keep going.
There’s so many great films with so many actors that really deserve that recognition. I can’t wait for the day Rob Morgan gets his flowers with all the great work that he’s doing. I just think we just have to keep keep fighting. It’s definitely good I think to aspire to the Oscars but I think it’s also equally important that we represent at the AAFCA awards and also NAACP Image Awards and just keep working and the recognition will come.
People got to see Dear Basketball, which is the Oscar animated short film that Kobe Bryant won, on ESPN. Now for those who are going to get to know who you are, where would they be able to get to see Hair Love?
Matthew A. Cherry: Hair Love is available on all of Sony animations, social media platforms and you can search it on YouTube. It’s on Twitter. If you follow me, it’s on my pin tweet. Just search Hair Love and it’ll come right up, the whole film. It’s only six minutes.
Can you talk about talk about Karen R. Toliver, your producing partner?. Talk to me about the collaboration between the both of you.
Matthew A. Cherry: Like I was saying before with how we need representation in all levels, Hair Love wouldn’t be at the level that it is if it wasn’t for Karen. Karen is the Executive Vice President of Creative at Sony animation. She saw us. She saw the vision. She was involved from an early stage. And literally, if it wasn’t for Karen, we would probably would have finished it and put it online, but I don’t think it would have been at this level. I really want to highlight her because she’s just so incredible. It’s so rare that you have a black woman that’s that high up at a studio. Then also she’s an incredible, incredible producer in her own right and if we win, she’ll be the first African American woman to win in the animation category be that short film or feature.
Then there’s the story. This story is going to resonate with a lot of families, but specifically fathers. At the end of the day, even though it’s six minutes, what do you want people to get out of it?
Matthew A. Cherry: There is three different things. I definitely want to represent for black fathers who so often get a bad rap in mainstream media. We get all these stories that we’re not president and everything else, but studies have actually shown that black men are the most involved in their kids’ lives. But if you look at movies and TV shows, you wouldn’t think that. Second, to represent just a black family unit, especially in animation just because we don’t have a lot of representations of that in animation. That was really important and then also just to represent for black hair and help normalize that. I think so often our hair’s police and we can’t wear it at certain jobs and in certain schools. You have the situation with the Texas high school student DeAndre Arnold in Houston right now. We were actually backed during our Kickstarter campaign, by the folks behind the The C.R.O.W.N. Act that Los Angeles Senator Holly J. Mitchell authored, and it is now become a law in New York, California, New Jersey.
Hopefully the film allows a broader conversation around black hair and normalizing it to happen and we’re really proud to help to get the word out about the C.R.O.W.N. Act because it needs to pass in all 50 states.
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