Video: Liberty

Loggy and Alex’s friendship in Miami’s redeveloping Liberty Square is threatened when Loggy learns that Alex is being relocated to another community.

Issues of politics, gentrification, community and epistemology subtly collide in Humes’s evocative and assured short film, Liberty, which has won awards at Berlin, SXSW and the Miami Film Festival. In a series of beautifully captured scenes featuring teens Humes cast from a local high school’s dance troupe, two friends, Loggy (Milagros Gilbert) and Alex (Alexandra Jackson), practice a routine they’ll present at their new building’s groundbreaking ceremony, even as their relationship is strained by their impending separation and the confiscation of Loggy’s mother’s memorial. This short film finds haunting imagery in the hollowed-out apartment complex while scenes unfold with documentary-like realism. Humes didn’t give her actors a script, guiding them instead through improvised dialogues. “I’m drawn to improvisation because I respect how we relate to each other as a community,” she says. “I value the richness of unspoken understanding, and in my filmmaking, I’m trying to create an experience within the realm of connection. I guess I was needing to have for myself a ‘black woman–connected experience,’ and this film was the channel for that!” [Filmmaker Magazine]

Writer/Director: Faren Humes
Producers: Katherine Fisher, Diego Nàjera, Diana Ward
Executive Producer: Kimberly Han
Executive Producers – Film Independent: Valerie Castillo Martinez, Francisco Velasquez, Angel Kristi Williams
Starring: Milagros Gilbert, Alexandra Jackson
Cinematographer: Zamarin Wahdat
Editor: Aleshka Ferrero
Choreographer: Traci Young-Byron
Production Designer: Gabriela Soto

Running time: 16 minutes

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