Shared a brief video.

Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to co-director a short fiction on 16 mm film. A few months before that, I remember feeling hopeful and euphoric as I submitted the application. Up to that point, I finished documenting a short on how local restaurants were impacted by the pandemic in Montgomery County. The documentary felt, although honorable on behalf of the restaurant owners trusting us, hallow in what we hoped to deliver in the backdrop of an actual pandemic. And although, I worked on film projects with my peers before, I struggled to create organic friendships, often missing out on the connections made living on campus. Come January, and I met, lived, struggled, and perceived with other like-minded, but also niche filmmakers. There were times when I felt overwhelmed, and found solutions to communicate ideas through cultural and language barriers, and overall work around learning curves from students with different film backgrounds. In retrospect, I’m incredibly grateful for the entire experience and all its ups and downs. More so, I’m thankful for meeting my roommate, and all our long conversations on plotting stories, deciphering controversial movies, breaking in the industry as a person of color and so on. Ultimately, Prague taught me many lessons, one of them being the value in living with your peers, especially those who turn to be long term collaborators. In doing so, it sets the foundations for healthier friendships, and increases chances of networking effectively. Earning the scholarship will surely help me move forward in my academic career. At the same time, levitating the huge financial cost will also help me sustain myself to live near campus. In terms of the future, I like to rationalize the “future” to the next four years. During those four years, I plan to break my way into Los Angeles. Funny enough, since my roommate and I hold the same academic standing, we plan to take a gap semester to build out a network in California and then utilizing an entire year to work on our senior thesis. Currently, I continue to work on PA gigs in the summer, intern for the Gotham Institute, previously known as Film Independent, as a Narrative Programming, dine tables at a country club and record a podcast episode. I say all this in efforts to draw a rough sketch on the kind of person I am, not just a student.