Co-directors Travon Free & Martin Desmond Roe Win Oscar for Short Film ‘Two Distant Strangers’ and make history in the process!
When asked by Blackfilm.com press, right after they accepted their historic Oscar win, if they would collaborate again in the future, the co-directors had this to say:
“Two Distant Strangers,” about a young black man caught in a recurring deadly encounter with a police officer that forces him to re-live the same awful day over and over again, took home an Oscar for the best live-action short film on Sunday, beating out “Feeling Through,” “The Letter Room,” The Present,” and “White Eye. Free, who also wrote the screenplay, made history as the first Black filmmaker to win the Oscar for live-action short film.
“Two Distant Strangers” was inspired by the world’s response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the cyclical nature of reliving the worst version of Groundhog’s day imaginable. While the Netflix film was well-received, there was some controversy from critics citing the repetitive portrayal of anti-Black violence was “more triggering than thought-provoking.”
The short film excelled in truncating an epidemic into a 32min work of art that tells a hugely consequential [and relevant] story without falling too deep into being trauma porn and not being too shallow that it fails to convey what lies at the core – the resilience of what it means to be black in America.
Free had this to say in his powerful acceptance speech about police killings and indifference to Black pain, as he and Roe accepted the award:
“Today the police will kill three people. And tomorrow the police will kill three people and the day after that, the police will kill three people because on average, the police in America every day kill three people, which amounts to about 1,000 people a year and those people happen to disproportionately be Black people. James Baldwin once said the most despicable thing a people can be is indifferent to other people’s pain. I ask that you not be indifferent. Please, don’t be indifferent to our pain.”
Kevin Durant and Van Lathan are listed as executive producers, and Jesse Williams — a producer, on IMDB. Durant tweeted his excitement about the win.
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Travon Free & Martin Desmond Roe Win Oscar for Short Film ‘Two Distant Strangers’ Travon Free & Martin Desmond Roe Win Oscar for Short Film ‘Two Distant Strangers’
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