On Wednesday night, Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater will play host to Bay Area Film Night, an event that features a panel discussion and a screening of two short films that are truly from the soil.
It’s a Bay Area Film Night, For Real For Real
San Francisco-based filmmakers Jamal Trulove and Maya Cameron-Gordon pose for a photo while on the set of the film 'What'chu Mixed With?' (Courtesy of Maya Cameron-Gordon)
Behind the films What’chu Mixed With? and I Thought You’d Never Ask there’s a slate of actors, producers and directors, as well as extras and notable venues, that are all local. And the stories depicted in the movies are stitched together with the fibers that make up this region’s unique cultural cloth.
The event falls in line with the theater’s dedication to highlighting local filmmakers — Wednesday’s film night is all about bringing more local representation to the big screen and fueling a growing Bay Area film industry.
What’chu Mixed With? stars Jasmin Corley as a San Francisco mixed-race teenager named Alexis. Struggling to find herself after her father leaves the family, the main character’s identity issues hit an apex as she has a bit of a breakdown while trying to manage her curly hair. Her mother, a white woman with flowing straight hair, has no idea what to do either.
Luckily, Alexis’ mother is a teacher in Hunters Point and a student in her class named Precious is one of the coolest young women on the block.
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Mariah Fields, daughter of late San Francisco rapper Cougnut and an MC in her own right (she goes by the moniker Alien Mac Kitty or AMK), plays the role of Precious. A gold grill-wearing, street-savvy mentor to Alexis, Precious is a fly fashionista who knows how to hustle and have a good time while doing so. Precious not only helps Alexis style her hair, she passes her down earrings and fresh kicks. She even shows Alexis how to defend herself when other girls start talking trash.
“I thought about this time in my life when I was about 12 years old,” says filmmaker Maya Cameron-Gordon, who who set the semi-autobiographical short film in the flip phone and Myspace era of the early 2000s.
A mixed-race woman herself, Cameron-Gordon was raised by her white mother after her Black father moved back to Los Angeles for medical reasons. She too struggled with identity issues; she went to a predominantly white middle school and lived in a majority Black neighborhood.
Like Alexis, hairstyles gave a young Cameron-Gordon a hard time, until she met someone who could show her the ropes.
“There was an older girl that my mom introduced me to,” Cameron-Gordon explains. The girl was about four years her senior, popular and from Hunters Point. “She took me under her wing and exposed me to different parts of the city I hadn’t been exposed to.”
That experience of being put on game both inspired the film and changed Cameron-Gordon’s life.
She’s open about the lifestyle choices that came after, and how they brought about some setbacks — including run-ins with the law. But later in her teens another San Francisco institution provided a second beacon of light for the emerging writer: the San Francisco Black Film Festival.
“That was a huge moment for me,” Cameron-Gordon says of attending the event. It wasn’t one specific film that moved her, but she left the festival with an “inner knowing” that she was supposed to be in circles of storytellers. Cameron-Gordon eventually published a children’s book and earned a graduate degree in filmmaking.
Wednesday night’s screening at the Grand Lake Theater will be her big-screen directorial debut. As a person who was raised in San Francisco and was crafted by the culture of this corner of the world, she’s the reason this film night exists.
“We’ve been deprived,” says Cameron-Gordon about the need for local film events like this. The Bay Area has so much talent, she says, but it doesn’t get recognized nearly as much as other regions.
“A lot of times we see films that are set in Los Angeles. We see ’em in New York, but we have such a unique culture,” Cameron-Gordon attests. “And we have some characters that definitely need to be on the screen, people that the world needs to see.”
That sentiment is echoed by Jamal Trulove, who co-organized the event with Domonique Fines and wrote the night’s second film, I Thought You’d Never Ask.
Inspired by a dream he had while attending the Sundance Film Festival in 2024, Trulove set out to write a piece that explores the idea of a woman facing the “biological clock” and a man eager to find the right one to settle down with.
With insight from lived experiences as well as his production team, he ended up with a sweet love story. The film deals with the pressure of having a baby by a certain age, finding someone to marry and the issue of divorce rates in the Black community.
“The concept of it was to create a conversation about love, marriage, and the reasons why things fall apart,” says Trulove. Another goal was to infuse the film with “our culture.”
A very universal story about love, timing and communication between intimate partners, the film has a distinguished Bay Area flavor. It stars Oakland’s Keren Southall as Lisa and Titus VanHook as Nathan. They’re joined on screen by a chorus of Bay Area faces, including Tia Nomore and Devin “Sauce” Davis.
After his role as Kofi in the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Trulove understood the power of giving screen time to local folks.
“Everybody wants to get into this field,” says Trulove, noting how a lack of resources and know-how impedes a lot of folks’ big-screen dreams.
But having a nucleus of talent, community support and the backing of local establishments makes the dream more attainable. “People can identify with it,” he says of the local connections shown in the films. “And that’s what it comes down to.”
Another key component of what’s needed for filmmakers is sustainability, Trulove says. Referencing the rich history of independent musicians making it in the Bay, he imagines the same direct-to-audience approach could be used for filmmakers.
“There’s so many Bay Area stories that are untold,” he says. And when our stories are told, he laments, too often we’re not the ones telling them. His question: What if we created conversation pieces about people really born and raised in the Bay?
“At the same time,” Trulove says about his vision for the local film industry, “we need to celebrate us.”
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Bay Area Film Night takes place at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater on Wednesday, June 11 at 6 p.m. The event is free, and you can sign up for the waitlist.
