Kevin Jerome Everson Can Make a Film on the Spot

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 250, ‘ON SET’

This summer, I’ll make my first foray into narrative feature filmmaking. The film, Lowndes County, will be shot in Columbus, Mississippi – the county where my parents grew up. The film is about my dad and two of his brothers who drove school buses when they were just 14, 15 and 16 years old in the segregated South. Talaya Delaney and I co-wrote the script 20 years ago. Initially, we worked on it for three or four years, trying to get grants. While the whole film industry is still racist, back then it was really racist: they weren’t looking at any Black stuff, let alone period pieces. 

We’re hoping to work with some of the crew from RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024), like production designer Nora Mendis. I’m not a writer, so I find it’s good to work with a writer, because it makes me more disciplined. My friend Devon Collins has this great line which I’ve written on my chalkboard: ‘If I’m the smartest person on the set today, I’m not making any money.’ And there’s truth to that. When you’re making a film, you want to surround yourself with talented people all the time.

I’m also working on an opera with composer David Dominique. He composed the music and did the sound design on the latest film in my series ‘Eclipse’ (2018–ongoing), When the Sun Is Eaten (Chi’bal K’iin) (2024), and now we’re collaborating on his project. Later this year, I’ll be in Italy, shooting a film about the writer William Demby. He fought as a soldier in Italy during World War II and, afterwards, he returned and stayed, working as a translator and writing novels. I’m making it with my friend Justin Randolph Thompson, who was a former student of mine when I taught at the University of Tennessee and is now a successful artist living in Florence. I included him in my 2012 short, Rhinoceros, where he played Alessandro de’ Medici, who ruled the Florentine Republic in the 1530s and was Black.

So, currently, I’m doing these weird collaborative projects, but I usually prefer to work on my own. I’d rather just shoot something – one thing – and leave it at that. The same way some people envision feature-length projects, I see five different films. I started off as a fine art photographer, but I liked what it doesn’t do: duration. I’m into dirty time. When I was 14 years old, I saw a friend’s brother get killed by a motorcycle. I remember it was 5:05 pm, 20 April 1979. Ever since then, I carry a watch.

In many of my films – ‘Birdwatching’ (2019–ongoing), ‘Eclipse’, ‘Mansfield’ (2014–21) – I’m concentrating on form; it just happens to be that Black people are standing around. For instance, I like it when the subject matter creates light and darkness in the film, which is one reason why I’ve been chasing the eclipse. If there’s a totality lasting more than three minutes that’s visible from Earth, I’ve promised myself that I’m going to take a team and film it, no matter what. We’re going to Algeria and Tangiers in 2026. What I’m trying to get at is that one has to earn abstraction. You can’t just show up and start making some abstraction: I’m still earning it.

I’ve always thought filmmaking and architecture are the worst art forms because they’re so expensive and require so much collaboration. But the big thing with filmmaking is that, when you ask for production money, it seems like you’re asking for permission to make the film. I’m also a painter; I don’t need permission to make paintings, so why should I do the same with films? Filmmaking is just like dance, poetry or painting: it’s all a practice. The practice is always making a thing, and you can’t waste time asking around for money. I just made a bunch of three-minute films in the past few weeks. I didn’t need permission to make those: I was going to make them anyway.

As told to Carlos Valladares

This article first appeared in frieze issue 250 with the headline ‘Without Permission’

 ^{Main image: Kevin Jerome Everson, Vanilla Cake With Strawberry Filling (detail), 2014, video still. Courtesy: the artist}