Guz: Portrait of a Baller as a Young Man from joshua bee alafia on Vimeo.
The Reelworks filmmaker mentorship program approached me with a special project a few months ago. They wanted to do a portrait of a young father to be who was aging out of the Fostercare system named Chris Guzman as part of a series of joint collaborations with Youth Communications. Chris writes for Represent Magazine, and impressed the editors of the magazine with his man up attitude in being dedicated to being a good father, even as he was going through a break up with his pregnant girlfriend. I ended up spending several days with Guz, shooting him in his environment, interviewing his homies, and going up to the Bronx to shoot him in his first apartment, his first experience of being on his own after many years of group homes. He told me about his dreams of playing in the NBA and I've recently shot him meeting up and playing some hoop with Jaime Peterson, a professional basketball player who plays for Grupo Begar Leon in Spain. That will be part two of the video above.
Funny how the gig came in synchonicity to where a lot of my energy is directed these days, from The Seed to Let's Stay Together, I've been really thematically drawn to envisioning the strong family unit, celebrating parenthood as we currently are in a real crisis when it comes to bringing up the youth in safe, nurturning environments. The youth have been abandoned by society on a planetary scale... but we can still step up and invest energy into their blossoming potential.
