Instagram story viewer> @the.produced> Tagged

The Produced Media

@the.produced

1.3K

followers

846

following

Producing Perspectives.
Publication dedicated to conversations with filmmakers, artists and cultural makers by @thanhliieu
📧[email protected]

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

I 🫶🏼 working with my friend Thanh!

Thank you @brianvanwyk for the shots!

90

11

Thanh’s individual BTS pictures of her VIFF interviews hosted at @filmboldly

Thank you Thanh for letting me capture this moment for you, and thank you Filmable for being so nice and welcoming!

40

3

films and friends 🫠

3

10

@the.produced went to TO for @insideoutfestival & i got no notes

168

2

Thank you @the.produced for covering our film and amplifying diverse voices in the industry. Interview video is out now! We’ll be sharing reels in the next few weeks 🎬

25

0

in conversation with @the.produced 🧡

Read more at: open.substack.com/pub/theproduced/p/tram-anh-nguyen-and-the-softened

70

2

Art brings pleasure.
Good art brings depth.
Great art haunts, unsettles, challenges, and confronts all of one’s internalized biases and assumptions.

I was first introduced to Coates’ work in my last year of high school when I studied Between the World and Me, and much of my thinking and sensibilities have been shaped by, precisely, Coates’ haunting words and writing.

In 2024, Coates released his new book The Message, a series of essays written to his students on the art of writing and the responsibility of the artist. He takes us through his journeys to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina; and Palestine’s West Bank. In the latter, Coates describes witnessing apartheid in real time, surrounded by fresh rubble every day in a system committed to reducing Palestinian people to mere numbers and unidentifiable bodies, tools subservient to the state's imperial and colonial project.

Of course, I wasn’t surprised when the book faced "backlash" (whatever that means) and was tagged as "controversial." Maybe that’s exactly why the book exists: to open our eyes to the devastating fact that so many refuse to believe - multiple truths can exist at once.

Since when does calling out inhumanity, condemning imperialism and genocide, and challenging a state-building project rooted in ethnocracy become an extremist act?

These ideas are the very crux of The Message: to show us that writing and art are so powerful, they threaten institutionalized and privileged beliefs. And that making art should never stop.

I want to leave you with another favorite quote of mine from The Message: "Your oppression will not save you."

Have you read this book yet?

9

0

537

3

I got to chew on my thoughts for James Baldwin's The Creative Process essay this week. Here are my very sporadic notes.

I love this passage so much, and I can see its echoes in the conversations I had with my Reel Talk guests over at @the.produced, who create art that unsettles the 'supposed,' that bothers them and challenges internalized biases.

Another poignant point beautifully laid out in this essay is that the artist must learn to sit in aloneness. I don't think this idea of solitude implies a state of nihilism—to assume nothing good exists and that death is the ultimate answer. Nor does it mean neglecting the warmth of our surroundings and retreating into isolation.

Instead, it is about sitting with our fears and seeing where they take us.

Aloneness, here, means that we as creators take this journey on our own to protect you. When you finally see our art, you'll know where we went. You get to decide if you want to go there or not. And if our photography, writing, or films are moving enough, maybe they’ll empower you to go there, too.

Going to these depths alone allows us to unearth why the human race operates most functionally and effectively in fear, a fear that manifests not as vulnerability but in all forms of bigotry.

That's the problem.

Another comedian and activist I love, @alokvmenon , has expressed something in the same vein: these perpetuations of hate ultimately boil down to fear—fear of death and fear of the end of the world.

Baldwin says in the essay: "We all know this, but we would rather not know it."

As artists, we create because we have yet to fully know ourselves and aren't comfortable with the depths—perhaps the darkest depths—our minds are capable of going. But what about those who don't see themselves as creatives? I think that's where Baldwin sees the responsibility of the artist shining the brightest: to tell those who have acclimated to the normalized that perhaps their idea of normal is simply what they’ve been wired to accept.

It's okay if you don't sit right with what you're taught.

Source: James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998).

14

2

i ❤️‍🔥 @the.produced

336

22