To no one’s surprise, the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF), which was supposed to run from April 29-May 3, was forced to cancel this year in the face of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The Parkway Theatre, the festival’s headquarters, has been closed since last month but—in some heartening news for fans of alternative cinema—has (temporarily) rebranded itself as the Parkway Virtual Theatre, hosting a streaming movie platform directly on its site.

Nonetheless, for indie filmmakers, the cancellation of festivals like MdFF can have a chilling effect on the success and viability of their movies. To that end, we wanted to check in with local documentarian and MdFF board member Ramona S. Diaz, whose A Thousand Cuts, about a fearless journalist taking on a corrupt Philippine president, was set to have its local premiere at the fest.

She spoke to us from her home in Mt. Washington.

Tell us the about your film.

It’s about press freedom in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte, who’s widely known for his war on drugs. It takes place in 2019, against the backdrop of the midterm election. I follow the journey of Maria Ressa, a prominent journalist who is speaking truth to power. And I follow her through this season of election when she gets arrested twice. The film turns out to be about press freedom, disinformation, and the war on drugs, all those things intertwining.

You had brought A Thousand Cuts to Sundance, right?

Yes, in competition. We were scheduled to screen at 12 film festivals this spring. And special screenings, all of which, of course, were canceled.

It was just going to be a classic roll out of small independent film—you premiere at a top tier festival, the spring festivals give you momentum, and then you do your sort of limited theatrical in the summer, and then it’s on to award season. That was a nice plan many years ago, it seems.

How was the reception at Sundance?

Something happens at Sundance and other festivals. You show them a documentary film and the audience has been immersed in someone else’s life for two hours…and then when the lights come up those people actually come up on stage. Like, they jump off the frame. The audience absolutely levitates. It’s this magic that happens that can’t ever happen on Zoom. It was beautiful.

You were also supposed to screen at SXSW in Austin. When did you find out that it had been canceled?

I was on my way to Manila to have a private sneak preview screening of the film to the people who participated in it. So they were flying me out. I fell asleep—by the time we were over the Pacific, I woke up and saw on my phone that it was canceled. And I knew then that everything would be canceled. A lot of people were looking to see what SXSW was going to do because it was the first major festival. By the time I left Manila five days later, everything was canceled—Cleveland, Full Frame, Hot Docs.
Some people were postponing, which I think was just postponing the inevitable.

Was it hard getting out of Manila?

I flew there, I think March 7. The screening was on Tuesday. I did some master classes. And then the plan was, on Thursday, I would fly directly to Austin.
The world changed in a week. So when South By was canceled, I thought, I’m going to stay the weekend in Manila. Why not?
So I stayed, which was not a very good idea! In the span of like 48 hours, the country was shutting down and the president gave everyone 72 hours to [come home]. All international flights were being grounded. But yes, I was able to get out.

How disappointing was the cancellation of the MdFF for you?

It was interesting for me to be a filmmaker and then sitting on the board of the Maryland Film Festival. I could really see it from both sides. Of course, as a filmmaker, you always wish, let’s just postpone. But the reality is, it’s a tough choice. Even if you postpone until fall, six months later you’re mounting another festival. How do you do that?

What’s the plan to roll out the film? Are you going to do Video on Demand? Or take advantage of the Parkway’s new streaming platform?

We’ve turned down most digital offers. As a consumer there’s so much glut right now. Because everyone’s thinking the same way: “Let’s put our film out there! People are home!” But I personally get very overwhelmed by choices. So I just decide I’m going to read a book. I really love that specialness and anticipation of a live audience. We’re willing to sit it out until the summer [in the hopes that the film gets a theatrical release].

This whole thing must be so disappointing for you.

I do have to say: I’m very lucky. I have a team. I have sales agents and funders backing it and other people thinking as to what to do with it. But I’m still mourning my film. There’s something that happens when you roll out a film like this. You form a cohort with other filmmakers who are at every festival and that becomes your cohort throughout the year. It becomes a special group. I’m mourning that cohort. It’s not going to happen this year. Relative to what’s happening in the world—people are dying—I feel a little guilty for mourning. But it’s still a real grief, I think.

I really look forward to seeing the film when this is all over.

In the theater! Hopefully at the Parkway, live.

Rich Croce—also known by his stage name, MC Bravado—is passionate about working with organizations that teach the intersectionality of hip-hop and education. One of the local groups he works with, Beats Not Bullets, brings in instructors to teach at-risk youth how to make music and gain industry experience. The organization once sent Croce to Lake Clifton High School in Clifton Park to pass on the wisdom he’s accrued in his 17 years as an artist, and he found himself drawn to a particularly gifted student in the program.

“I [developed] an affinity [for] him,” says Croce, a former teacher at Lake Clifton. “He was a leader and ahead of the curve in the program. However, he wasn’t coming to class. I invited him to a performance I had at Baltimore Soundstage and offered to get him involved. I asked him what he thought I wanted from him, and he knew I wanted him to go to school. His attendance went up.”

It’s stories like these that Croce and his partner, Brandon Lackey—another former teacher —are hoping to use as they prepare an panel, entitled “Hip-Hop’s Emerging Educational Industry,” for the South by Southwest (SXSW) education conference, part of the larger annual music and film festival returning to Austin, Texas next month. The panel, happening on March 11, will feature a representative from the Boys and Girls Club of Baltimore, as well as content creator Michell Clark of MTV News. It will be followed up by a hip-hop showcase at SXSW on March 18 featuring artists like Wordsworth and Baltimore’s own Ollie Voso.

“Our thing has always been presenting Baltimore in a positive light to counteract any negative narrative and draw attention to the programs that are using education to reach youth,” Lackey says. “We’re highlighting those who are really trying to help young folks.”

This year, Charm City will be well-supported at the festival, as both TT the Artist’s directorial debut, and Charm City Kings—a Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith-backed film about dirt bike culture in Baltimore—are set to be screened.

As for Croce and Lackey, their partnership is rooted in music. Lackey owns a studio at Maryland Art Place downtown, where he employs engineers and teaches interns the ins-and-outs of music production. The two bonded over their similar career paths, as Lackey taught at New Hope Academy a year before Croce. They attended SXSW together last year, but they went as attendees rather than presenters.

Ahead of their panel and showcase, we spoke with the local artists about their hopes for the festival, creating music together—Croce is working on an album with Lackey that they are producing on their own label—and the niche they’ve carved out for themselves.

Which came first: making music or the idea for the panel?
BL: We had the common bond of education from the jump. It was always something we talked about. We’ve been to SXSW a bunch of times separately, but just seeing the whole edu side of what the new trends are, and then conversely what we’re doing with hip-hop—we know there’s a place for this.

Has the fact that you’ve been to the festival before helped shape your panel?
BL: Absolutely. Because there’s so many panels. It’s the same thing with the show. If you go to South by, there’s 100 shows happening all the time. It can’t just not suck—you have to do a lot to stand out. I just want it to be super engaging. It’s going to be very easy in a convention format for people to be up there and talk. But we really want to engage and connect with people and show how this is something that is really useful.

RC: Last year through a connection, I was able to play a showcase at SXSW. We were down there and networked. We had to really get ahead of the curve. We wanted to do our own event that occupied edu and music space. We were able to get someone who worked at the festival to give us a timeline and what it should look like and told us how to figure out how to pitch.

What is the relationship between music and education? How does it factor in to what you’re trying to accomplish?
BL: There’s a couple of Nas records where he says words in a different way that is [technically] the incorrect way. But that’s just a perfect example of how culture ends up influencing language. I think that’s the basis of the interaction right there. That’s where it starts. They have to work together.

RC: You could do a lesson in dialect on that. Your English lesson could be “Oh, this is dialect. Why does he say it like that? Well, he’s from New York.” You could talk about what was happening in the city at the time that made him write an introspective record about it.

Naturally the student-teacher relationship creates a bit of a power imbalance—do you think that connecting with kids over a shared interest helps remove that?
RC: The duality of this is interesting. Because kids are the keepers of what’s new and what’s cool. That can inform—even if our music is classic golden era type hip-hop, it can help give a flair to it that maybe it didn’t have before, and we can be kind of a bridge showing them what our stuff is like.

You’re establishing a commonality and they’re not looking to you as foreign. I think a lot of people that teach try to get caught up in proving they know so much. I’ve seen brilliant people flame out for that reason. You are vulnerable and you are learning together. As you continue to build that culture, that informs the music and the common ground and lets the whole ecosystem flourish.

How do you think what you’re trying to do is perceived?
RC: Hip-hop at its inception had the punk and cultural disruptor thing going. I think people only recently have accepted it as mainstream. A lot of times the everyday person who doesn’t know much about it or only knows what they hear on the radio might dismiss it in terms of its content and not really know the depth of what it can do. Getting rid of that stigma and idea is a big part of [what we’re doing]. As that continues to happen in mainstream pop culture, people are starting to see how viable hip-hop can be as a formal education tool. It had to be accepted on a grander scale.

There are certain norms in place when it comes to teaching. Do you find it’s hard to break through because of them?RC: Absolutely. I left teaching for a variety of reasons, but one of the things that bothered me was the way they set the curriculum up. It’s lined up every day for what you’re supposed to be going over and if a representative from the city walks in, they want to see you’re doing that exact thing on that date. They take so much of the autonomy and creativity out of it. How do you expect students to be treated as individuals if you’re that rigid? I get accountability, but [what we’re trying to do] can be something that helps that middle ground.

What’s the best case scenario for you with this panel?
BL: Having enough connections to do this at other festivals would be ideal. For me, it would be really cool if we meet some people who are interested in getting involved in these programs in Baltimore and to have outside representation outside of the city talking about what’s going on. If someone wants to make a difference somewhere, Baltimore is a place that could really use it.