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(upbeat music begins) - Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 6th, and I'm Bakari Kitwana, author, journalist, director of rap sessions, community dialogues on hip hop, and a 2023-24 distinguished visiting scholar at the University at Buffalo.

It is truly an honor for me to introduce today's special City Club Forum where we are broadcasting live from the Future Land Conference at the Miami Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square.

(audience cheers) For those who are not familiar, particularly our radio listeners on 89.7 WKSU, Future Land is more than just a conference.

It's a movement driven by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

It aims to make Cleveland, which is an emerging tech hub, a leading destination for those currently underrepresented in the tech space.

To that end, Future Land strives to ensure that black, Latino, indigenous, and women innovators have equitable access to capital and growth opportunities to start their own businesses and flourish.

Our speaker today, Ghanaian born filmmaker, Blitz Bazawule, began his entrepreneurial journey as a business administration major at Kent State University, where I met him in 2005, and next as an independent hip hop artist turning down unfair corporate label record deal offers.

He instead chose to chart his own path.

He went from creating his own music, pressing his own CDs, and touring nationally, to creating his own live 12 piece band, teaching himself to master instruments and video production, and headlining major international festivals overseas.

He carried this spirit into his career as a filmmaker with "The Burial of Kojo," which he wrote, directed, and raised funds to produce independently before it was released on Netflix in 2019.

He knows firsthand the challenges faced by black, brown, and indigenous folks underrepresented in the tech, arts, culture, and startup economy.

And it is because of his own sense of hustle, integrity, and ingenuity that he is now making headlines as director of the Contemporary Musical Reimagining of "The Color Purple," a film produced by Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones, which is set to release in theaters on Christmas Day.

In September, 2005, a semester away from graduation at Kent, he told the campus newspaper in an interview about his art.

Quote, "The world is calling me.

The Midwest is where I shaped my thoughts.

This is where I nurture my art.

I'm not going to feel the effect of now leaving because I'm urgently trying to touch the world."

His success in achieving this is truly an inspiration for others to follow.

A Renaissance man in the tradition of true Black excellence, Bazawule served as director for Beyonce's Visual album, "Black Is King" in 2020.

He has emerged as a visual artist, with exhibits at major art galleries and museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

And in 2022, he also stepped into the literary scene with his debut novel "Descent of Burnt Flowers" published by Random House, which takes readers on an adventure into the beauty and magic of his native Ghana, and how that nation's story overlaps with the Black American and Pan-African struggle for liberation.

The story in many ways parallels the day-to-day challenges faced by entrepreneurs struggling for their so rightful place in tech, arts, and beyond.

There are many, many takeaways from his incredible achievements.

My favorite is from his 2009 song, "Remembering the Future" in which he raps, "Remember one thing, I did it all without the bling."

Moderating the conversation today is Nwaka Onwusa, music historian and curator.

She served as the chief curator and vice president of Curatorial Affairs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and began her curatorial career at the Grammy Museum where she's curated over 25 exhibits , such as "All Eyes on Me," "The Writings of Tupac Shakur," "The Legends of Motown," and "The Taylor Swift experience."

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City club of Cleveland and Future Land, please join me in welcoming the amazing Blitz Bazawule and Nwaka Onwusa.

(audience applauds) - Thank you, Cleveland.

Thank you, Mr. Bakari.

Blitz, oh my God.

We're here, this is Futureland.

- Hey.

- Hey, how you feeling, how you doing?

- I'm fantastic.

- Oh, wonderful.

- How's everyone doing?

(crowd cheers) Fantastic.

- Beautiful, beautiful, so glad to have you.

We're just gonna jump right into this conversation because we don't have long.

So I heard Kent State in the conversation, we gotta bring it back to Cleveland, right?

So let's talk about how you started at Kent State.

What degrees?

Now we come from immigrant parents, okay.

I'm Nigerian, I already know.

Were you lawyer, doctor, teacher?

What was it that your parents wanted you to do?

- It was architect because, you know, you can draw and so your parents go, you are going to be an architect, son.

And I mean, for me, I always knew that art was going to be my final frontier, but you have to do it for your parents.

They sacrificed so much to get us where we are.

So I was very clear that I would have to get that degree, but once I did, I was like, I'm scot free and I'm gonna do what I want.

And I think that's where my journey through Kent State was incredibly important, because it was almost a training ground of sorts.

Every tour came through Cleveland.

I performed numerous times at the Agora, performed numerous times at the Grogg Shop.

These were places that I honed my skills.

I shot my very first short music video here.

I got a Super8 camera.

Me and my boy, Mark Rigel, we shot it downtown Cleveland, made it look like New York.

But, I mean, that's my deep affinity and love for this city, it runs really deep.

So it's truly an honor to be back.

- That feels so amazing.

Thank you so much for sharing.

So, you know, it's amazing to hear all of the firsts that Cleveland has provided you an opportunity with.

So we're here at Futureland where we're really embracing innovators, and the creators, and all of that.

And not only have you been to Cleveland, this is one stop in your journey, but you've traveled all over the world.

Can you talk a little bit about how those travels have impacted your creative juice, your creative experience?

How does that traveling speak to how you share stories?

- Well, first it begins with Ghana.

For me, I was born and raised in Ghana.

My family's from the northern most part of the country, Sisaala people and primarily farmers.

And my grandmother had one such farm.

And that farm is where I learned storytelling.

Late at night there wasn't electricity up there back then.

So it was about sitting around nocturnally and listening to these stories.

But I also learned something incredibly important that became a conduit for how I make all my work, was this concept of crop rotation.

Now, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this idea, right?

Where you plant crops that are meant to replenish the resources and nutrients in the soil that's depleted by a previous crop.

And my grandmother so beautifully and eloquently explained it to us as a way in which, you know, your soil was always going to be healthy.

And as I kind of evolved into a multihyphenate artist, I started practicing what I call "creative rotation."

And creative rotation, same concept, right?

When you create, inevitably you are depleted of your inner essence.

It's just the way it works.

So you have to figure out ways in which the work that you're making is constantly being rejuvenated and revived.

And so for me, the great fortune is that creative rotation has helped me do two things.

One, I'm in a constant state of creativity.

I'm never burnt out.

When I make a record, I don't have to make another record.

I can go write a book.

When I write a book, I don't have to write another book.

I can go make a movie.

And I do want to say this, we are all capable of some version of this.

We're all multiple things.

We're a multiplicity of things as humans.

And so it's always about figuring out things that can give you back what is taken out of you.

But I also say that one thing that has also helped me do is it's helped me stay away from the metrics.

And you guys know the metrics, the awards, the bestseller lists, all the things that have nothing to do with the work, but are constantly peripheral to the work, and are deep sources of stress, and are deep sources of why you don't enjoy or you get burned out.

And so, I don't read reviews, I don't participate.

I do my work, and before I know it, I'm off to the next work.

And so it just has always also kept me being as true to the work as possible.

And so, back to your question around, that's the beginning for me in terms of travel, like just what my grandmother bequeathed us was just like the beautiful beginning.

And then as I've traveled, I seek that in other cultures.

So when I'm in Brazil, I want to know how creative rotation works here.

When I'm in France, I wanna know how that works.

When I'm in Cleveland, I wanna know who's doing it, how they're doing it, and those things have just informed me to be, I feel, just a little bit more well-rounded as an artist, but even more important, as a human.

- As a human, thank you so much for breaking that down.

And I think that's so important for our entrepreneurs and creatives to hear, be multihyphenate.

You do not have to be that one thing.

And I think that's a struggle that we all deal with every day, those distractions.

Those distractions.

Storytelling though, when did you fall in love with storytelling?

- Man, it was those nocturnal stories.

I always say my grandmother was like the Netflix, HBO, Hulu of the time.

I mean those stories, and this is the beautiful way in which Africans tell stories that are incredibly cyclical and non-linear.

And that's where I really learned storytelling was my mother and my grandmother.

And the beauty of these stories were always, they were both in the realms of the seen and unseen.

And so, you know, it had an allure, like, today the story will be about this character, and these characters kept being recycled.

So you gotta remember, they gotta come up with stories every night, and at some point the stories run out.

So it's just recycling those stories.

But then now, you know, a bird comes back now as a table, a table comes back now as a human, and I learned that stories were in this amazing cyclical way.

And so when I got to writing my novel or working with Beyonce on "Black Is King," I mean, it was always about, how do you tell these stories?

And it's the same story being told, but on multiple realms.

And ultimately it brought me to "The Color Purple," which I think is probably one of the elements that really justify our reason for being.

- Yes, you know, when you talk about your storytelling, I've heard you mention the magical realism.

And then as you're talking about your grandmother and creating these characters, and you're seeing them revisited in moments of your life, how has magical realism, and please break it down for those who need to get familiar with your style of creating, but how have you infused that into all of your works from Shine?

I mean, you got the music videos, you got "The Burial of Kojo," you're talking about "Black is King," all of these moments.

I see it.

So can you talk a little bit about magical realism?

- Yes, I mean, I think, again, it's just a point of view.

And look, we all have our point of views based on how we arrive at storytelling, right?

If you grew up with your family stories, then they're gonna influence you as a storyteller as you move on.

And for me, those stories that I heard, as I said earlier, were kind of oscillated between the seen and unseen.

And the seen is, of course, the real, right?

When we see everything we know.

But we know that as beings, we don't just operate on the seen, there's the unseen.

I feel like just being able to tap into that, whether it's head space, whether it's ephemeral, like all these elements that are not necessarily seen, but are interesting when the camera is able to capture them, or when the pen is able to capture, you know?

And so anyway, for me, it's also allowed me to tell stories that are familiar, but in new innovative ways, right?

Because the stories are never just, and again, let's also remember there's a very western way in which stories are told, you know, three act structure, everything just kind of is grinding forward, right?

And most indigenous cultures tell stories in a very different way.

It's very cyclical and different in how we approach that.

And so I really, and this is back to this idea of entrepreneurship and creating your own, because that's all this is about.

I really believe that you have to be able to tap into these things that are innately you.

And you have to figure out, because you can't survive on somebody else's hill.

You'll only be able to survive on your hill and thrive on your hill.

And that hill requires you to dig deep, be clear, and I always use this incredible Tony Morrison quote, the late legendary, she says, "I stood at the edge, stood at the border, claimed it as central, and forced the world to move over to where I was."

All right, I'll repeat it.

"I stood at the edge, stood at the border, claimed it as central, forced the world to move over to where I was."

I'm paraphrasing here.

But the concept and idea that your edge can be center, as black, brown, indigenous people is something that we're not taught, we're not raised with, it's not even central to our culture.

We're always kind of going, okay, where are they at?

And how can I migrate to them?

Hopefully they'll understand me when I get there.

Well, the journey of them migrating to you is the beauty of the journey, right?

And honestly, the world's better for it.

The world's better for it, you know?

And so, as creatives in this room, I really encourage us to always remember that you come from an incredibly resilient history and culture, and that history and culture is your center.

And as long as you're able to hold that fort, the world always comes to you.

It has always happened and it always will.

- Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

God, you're speaking to it.

So how can that creative expression bridge the gaps and promote understanding among different communities?

And you really just hit on that, but how can it really bridge the gap?

And how have you seen your work bridge the gap?

- I mean, again, I think that there's, the way the world is structured has really, unfortunately created levels of disparity around value and culture, right?

Where elements of certain groups' culture and values are promoted over others in which I feel like we've been worse for that.

As I see the world, we're a constant amalgam of our meetings.

If I don't meet you, you don't grow.

If you don't meet me, I don't grow.

Right?

And so, when the world is centered around a specific culture, then we are all making this really unnatural migration to this center that isn't ours.

And I feel like once I understood that my work was worthy of the world arriving, I own that.

And I gotta tell you, there's been nowhere I've been, where my movies have played, where my music has played, where my books are read, that people's lives aren't better for that migration.

Look, I'll use music an example, because the barriers to music are quite low for black and brown people, right?

And because we've had the opportunity to create in this space unmitigated, we've been able to stick to our center.

So hip hop, R&B, jazz, funk, rumba, samba, bossa, reggae, ragga, I mean, the list goes on.

That's center, and the world's migration to these centers.

I mean, can you imagine your life without jazz?

Can you imagine your life without funk?

Can you imagine your life without hip hop, R&B, all these beautiful expressions?

Well, the barriers to entry there are low.

So we can, you and I can start a band right now and we'll be on the road.

Well, in the cinematic arts, it's much, much different.

The barriers to entry are much higher.

Well, that's where you start to see the discrepancy in terms of who gets to journey to who.

Because we do not know the cinematic equivalent of jazz.

We do not know the cinematic equivalent of funk.

Because people haven't been allowed to just create and make it.

And whenever you get a chance to get into this space, you're told how to do it.

And often it's through a very narrow Eurocentric lens.

That is the honest truth.

But there are multiple ways in which stories are told.

So my point is, imagine how much, look it's incalculable, how much the world loses every day by the intentional exclusion of African, indigenous, black, brown creative and intellectual genius.

It's incalculable.

We can't even do the math on it.

It's the same way you couldn't do the math on what your life will be like without all these musical expressions that you enjoy on the daily, when you're going through things and you play that R&B record.

Can you do the math on how that makes you feel?

You can't.

It's the same way that when you haven't seen these movies and when the artists haven't been free to create unmitigated, the world is only worse for it.

So again, my encouragement to entrepreneurs in this space and creatives in this space, go for it.

Create that space, fight through the red tape and the blockades.

Because what happens is that the world is better for, and we only foster more, whether we like it or not.

We only understand each other more.

We're only clearer about where each other comes from.

And to me, that's how the world gets better.

- Oh my gosh, amazing.

Can you talk a little bit about, let's get to "The Color Purple."

- Yes.

- In this journey to "The Color Purple," what were some of those challenges and experiences that you can share with us?

- Well, you know, when you are making a studio picture, it comes with the territory, but I'll say the first biggest one is that I happen to be the first Ghanaian to make a studio picture of that budget level.

(audience applauds) I don't think there's much to applaud there.

You know, the reality is that who do I call?

When I'm in that vortex of not understanding, not being supported, not being protected, who do you call to say, "When you did this back in blah, blah, blah, how did you manage to?"

And that's why, you know, I think it's incredibly important that we get out of the phase of firsts.

Because it only goes, I don't celebrate firsts.

I actually go, why am I the first?

Why?

Because now you start to build this pioneer syndrome, which is very difficult to navigate, because, am I doing it right?

If I mess this up, does it mess it up for everybody else that's coming?

Like, there are these hefty things that you have to carry.

You can't just be an artist.

You can't just show up and do the work, and you cannot really have the virtue and support of a historied past people who have done it.

And so, anyway, for me, those were the biggest challenges.

Of course I was very fortunate to have producers that supported my vision, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, that were all incredibly supportive.

But let's be honest and clear.

I come from a very different set of backgrounds, where immigrants, off the boat immigrants.

And you have to be able to call someone who has had to navigate that particular specific challenge.

This challenge of, who am I here?

What do I hold onto when I'm here?

What do I let go of?

What do I compromise?

What do I, what don't I compromise?

Those are things that I find are deeply challenging for any artist period, and certainly for immigrant artists, and certainly for black and brown indigenous artists.

And so, again, my hope is that the work that we're doing only spurs and opens doors where folks can show up as themselves.

- As themselves.

As themselves, I mean, you're telling a story of women who are showing up as themselves in "The Color Purple" and in your previous works, it's so beautiful to see that you've championed Black women, indigenous peoples, and you're telling these stories.

What were you most excited about that you got to bring the Blitz energy to to "The Color Purple?"

Like, what were you most excited about?

- Well, I mean, first when you get a call that they're remaking "The Color Purple" and they want you, you go, nah, not me.

- Not worthy.

- I mean, again, let's talk about Alice Walker's brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning book.

Let's talk about Steven Spielberg's brilliant cinematic classic.

Let's talk about the Tony Award winning Broadway play.

So, I mean, this is deep major history.

You don't want to be the one.

You don't want to be the one.

So anyway, I really fought it for a while, and I read the script, and I went back and, you know, for me, the thing was always, whenever in doubt, go back to Alice.

She bequeathed us this level of beauty, and joy, and challenge, and trauma, and all these things.

And my thing was, what can I bring to it?

So I went back to, again, my grandmother's stories, my mother's stories.

And the one thing that was always peculiar about those stories were the character's head space and giving the characters imaginations.

So I told myself, well, as long as I can do that for Celie, as long as I can give Celie an imagination, 'cause here's the other thing, there's a big misconception around people who deal with trauma and abuse that they're docile and they're waiting to be saved.

That's a big misconception.

People who deal with trauma and abuse are constantly working their way out of their trauma and abuse in their heads.

And if we will only take time to spend time in their heads, we'll understand that they are not waiting to be saved.

They're constantly building and working their way out.

And so for me, that's how I saw Celie, someone who was constantly navigating.

So I figured if I can just, if we can have a view into her head space, it gets richer.

So now if she thinks of a 50 piece orchestra I can give her a 50, she thinks of a giant grammaphone, I can get whatever this black woman from the rural south wanted and thought about, we can give to her.

And I think that was kind of where it became the real, true contribution to the canon.

And look, it's not completely novel to the canon either.

Alice Walker begins her book with, "Dear God."

You have to imagine a person of deep imagination, deep spirituality, deep understanding of a higher power, which also requires imagination, to be this character.

So it was already there.

All we did was just expand on it.

And I think that that's what we've brought to it.

And come Christmas day, I really hope everybody's out there rocking their purples.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

And filling up the theaters and making this an event.

- And speaking of technology, because this is, you know, we're also talking about technology here.

How did you really take advantage of technology in making this film?

You are a visual artist, so what were you most excited about using?

- Oh my God, I mean, first shout out to my DP, Dan Lawston, who's brilliant, and Fatima Robinson, who was my choreographer.

If you guys don't know Fatima's work, I mean, it goes deep.

From Michael Jackson, to Aaliyah, to, it goes on and on.

But she was the first person I hired, because I was very clear that this film was gonna require levels of movement.

And it had to be a cinematic kind of ballet between the camera and the movement of characters.

And I feel like one thing that troubles a lot of musicals is just the separation of big musical numbers and narrative dialogue scenes, where they're treated like different two things.

And so when they come together, they feel like they're fighting each other.

For us, it was very critical that these characters were always going to be, whether they were having a conversation, they were gonna be choreographed, so that by the time we get into the music, it's all working as one thing.

And so that was a very, very big thing that we were very excited about.

In terms of the technology itself, I mean, look, some of what these cameras can do these days, and they're not, look, my very first film we shot on DSLR cameras.

They weren't, you know, massive, studio level cameras.

And you know, I really always encourage and advocate for, start where you are, use what you have.

Do the best you can, and then start again.

And I think that, again, it's something that entrepreneurs have to keep hearing and keep hearing.

Your job is to just begin where you are, use the tools, figure out how to move to the next thing.

And then, so by the time I arrived with literally every tool I wanted, I mean, again, when you're making a film of this scale and caliber, you just gotta go, I want blah, blah, blah.

And they give it to you.

But I've also learned to make films small and intimate.

So I wasn't reliant necessarily on the technology.

I could find ways to kind of mitigate that.

And so again, working with brilliant, big visual effects, I mean, those were things that I learned on while working.

And just where the cinematic and technological advancements have gotten to are incredible.

But it's still gonna be about story, still about story.

And so you have to hone that craft, and you have to know how to tell a story.

Technology and everything else are tools to help you get there.

You don't hang a hammer in your house, right.

Use the hammer to hang a picture.

So your job is to master the tool and know what the tool is for, and the tool gets you to hang that beautiful portrait up.

- Oh my God, Blitz.

This is absolutely amazing.

We're excited to see what your imagination has created on the big screen.

And I am going to, I mean, I'm asking all these questions, but we have an audience full of questions for you, and we're gonna transition into that in a moment.

And here is Bakari.

All right.

- [Bakari] You guys are amazing.

- Thank you.

Blitz.

- Oh my God.

All right, we're about to begin the audience Q&A.

As we said earlier, if you want to ask questions, you want to come up to the microphone.

And don't play yourself by taking too long, 'cause it's gonna go fast.

I'm Bakari Kitwana, author, journalist, director of rap sessions, community dialogues on hip hop, and a distinguished visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo.

We're broadcasting live from the Futureland Conference at the Miami Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square.

Joining me on stage is Blitz Bazawule, author, visual artist, rapper, and film director of the upcoming film, "The Color Purple," which is set to release in theaters on Christmas Day.

Moderating the conversation is Nwaka Onwusa, music historian and curator, we welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our live stream at cityclub.org and live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Idea Stream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speaker, please text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

For those of you who are here, Blitz will be signing books after this session.

And for those of you who didn't come, y'all gonna have to catch him the next time.

May we have the first question, please?

- [Questioner] Hello?

- Hello.

- [Questioner] Hi, my name is Merl Johnson and I taught school in Cleveland 40 years.

And so it's always so exciting to hear from an artist, if you were talking to a classroom of students, they see the actors, they see the rappers, they don't see the directors.

How would you explain to a classroom of say, middle school students, why the directing is really, really so important?

- Oh, that's such a great question.

Thank you.

I really believe that the lens through which a story is told is the ultimate most important thing.

If we all got scripts, said the same words, there'll be a hundred different movies made outta those same words, outta those same set of parameters.

Right.

And what makes them different is your background, and who you are, and how you see the world, and how you process the world.

You decide if the camera goes up, if the camera goes down, based on how you were raised, based on your memory, sometimes it's even genetic memory.

You don't even, it's not even you saying the camera goes there.

It's your ancestors way before you telling you the camera goes there.

And it's incredibly important the Black, brown, indigenous people contribute to this beautiful tapestry of storytelling that is cinema.

'Cause cinema is truly one of the few arts that is encompassing of all the other arts.

You gotta write, you gotta know photography, you gotta know music to score your movies.

So you have to be multihyphenate to direct a movie.

You can't just come in and go "action" and "cut."

You have to understand how stories are told in multiple mediums.

And I say this to say, it's so critical that underrepresented voices, marginal voices, are part of the storytelling.

Because ultimately the way we also process each other, cinema is purports to be real life.

You understand?

It's the one creative endeavor that we go, man, they really live that.

Like, you don't, when you hear a song, rapper says he shot a lot of people, you kind of go, eh, I don't buy it.

You know, because you'll be in jail if you did.

But when cinema really gets, it postures as reality.

So it's also deeply dangerous if those who are telling the stories of you aren't people who are proximate and empathize, because they paint as part of the story that then becomes a stereotype that is built into black images.

I mean, there's a long running history of that, of these representations that seek to diminish and undermine.

And so I think that that part of the creative endeavor, look, it's great that we should be in all parts, you should be in front of the camera, behind the camera.

But those who are the ones through which this story is gonna be told are incredibly important.

And the more diverse that cadre is, the better our storytelling in general is gonna, and the more empathy we can build for each other.

- I'm so excited to see this movie.

I have a question for you that a lot of people ask me, a lot of young people ask me, and you may get this as well, but as a multihyphenate artist, as a young person, was there the one talent or the one expression that felt most natural to you?

For me it's music, and then it became a lot of different arenas.

But for you, what was that for you?

- That's a great question, too.

I call it the gateway.

The gateway art.

The one that gets you to go, I have something special to say.

For me it was visual art, it was drawing.

As a kid I drew all the time.

And it was the one thing that I did, I'll never forget this.

We had a, you know, probably in like class three, which would be like third grade here.

And I'd drawn, we had like art that day, and I'd drawn something, and my parents had come to pick me up from school, and you know, we had this old beat up Nissan Stanza, and I was in the back of it, and I saw my teacher running with like, waving something, trying to stop my dad from pulling out.

And I was like, my dad looked at me like, what have you done?

Yeah, you're dead.

You know, African dad, you are dead.

Okay, so my teacher's running, running, running, running.

You know, he has to pull to the side and he goes like, what has Samuel done?

And she goes, he did this, and like shows the art to my dad.

My dad's like, word.

Like, that's why you came running out?

But my mom immediately went, that's something special.

And it was the first time that I knew that I could do something that could elicit that level of excitement.

And my teacher, who granted didn't really like me that much, but was that excited that I'd done something that she hadn't seen before.

So that was it for me.

And I really encourage young people, little people, old people, all people to tap into those things that you are just naturally able to gravitate to, because they become the gateway to all these other beautiful layers and labyrinth of art that you might not even consider that you could do.

And again, this whole like jack of all trades, master of none, I don't buy that.

I go Jack of all trades, master of some.

You gonna master something, you know?

So I really encourage that we kind of explore them and keep trying them.

You might be great at something that you never thought.

- How do you find a new talent and what advice would you give to myself and people like myself who are looking to network and find the next you of the world?

- Great question.

And this is, I'm biting from the brilliant Issa Ra, it's about networking laterally, right?

We're so used to going, and that was me too, you know, if my film only got to blah, blah, blah, you know?

And what we don't realize is that to make the work, you have to make the work of people who are ready to make the work with you.

People who are emotionally, spiritually aligned, invested in the story that you're trying to tell.

And when I made my very first film, no one would give me a dime to make it.

I went on tour, saved as much as I could, which is only 40 grand, but was a fortune back then.

Went to Ghana, made a movie with people who wanted to make a movie with me.

None of us knew what the hell we were doing.

We went on YouTube, legitimately going, what does the first AD do?

I mean that's how early it was.

And this is not long ago, this was like 2017.

I went home to make my move my first film.

And making that first film, let me back up, 'cause this is a wild story.

My mom calls me out the blue, I'm in New York, it's New York so it's a shoebox, no windows.

My mom calls me and goes, Samuel, are you thinking of making a movie?

I'm making music now.

It's kind of plateaued, nothing really's happening.

She goes, I had a vision on everything.

Yeah, you know, African mothers with the vision.

She goes, I had a vision.

I saw Hollywood, right?

She goes, if you are thinking of making a movie, you should make it.

And I think I ran into you in 2017, right?

I had just gone home to Ghana to write, and when you met me at Afro-Punk, I was hustling to raise that money.

That's why I was at Afro-Punk performing.

That's how we met, was at Afro-Punk.

And I was working that stage 'cause I needed that money.

And I took that money and I took it home.

And, again, what I did was just find people who were ready to make a movie with me for $40,000, 'cause that's all we had.

And, you know, God is good, and I'm glad I listened to my mama.

That's the moral of the story.

When your mama calls you pick up, because that's the movie that Beyonce saw and said, well, first Ava saw it and was like, this needs to be on Netflix.

And so shouts to Ava DuVernay, amazing, grateful.

And that's what Beyonce saw and called me to do "Black is King."

And "Black is King" is what Steven, Oprah, and, you know, so I'm saying that to say, you gotta start where you are.

You gotta trust, and you can't be hoping.

You're gonna get there.

And I couldn't have told you that back then, but I did know that as long as we were able to just get the work done and do it to the best of our abilities.

And it's kind of what we've been talking about in terms of just claiming your edge as center and trusting that that migration will happen.

And just by doing that, and doing that alone, and trusting that we could make a film with our own voice, when you guys see "The Burial of Kojo," it is how Africans tell stories.

We didn't make it how anybody else told stories.

We made it in its cyclical, most avant-garde, most open stories that I grew up on.

Stories that they tell you no one wants to see.

So I really encourage you to just find that small cadre that are all here with you and are ready to do the work, get it done, and keep going.

And magic does happen.

Thank you.

Thank you.

(audience applauds) - Since this question came in through the conference app regarding wanting to know your thoughts in regards to AI in filmmaking.

- Good question.

I mean, as you guys know there've been strikes and there's still strikes going.

And a lot of it has to do with intellectual property, AI, and all of these artificial intelligence tools that are deeply disruptive to the creative process.

I am adamant about how important it is that humans are prioritized in all levels of the value chain.

It's not just the creative entertainment industry.

It's walking into a store and having nobody there.

And the elimination of so many entry level jobs that so many of us were beneficiaries of.

It's how we arrive here.

And when those jobs are gone, how do people get to where they need?

How do they afford these services?

And so I think that, you know, AI is deeply disruptive in that way.

Look, I don't think it's going away.

I think it's gonna be about how do we curtail, how do we protect people's intellectual properties?

How do we make sure that whatever, if you train an AI on my work, I'm getting paid every time that AI is used, right?

Because someone's got, something's gotta train the AI.

The AI just doesn't know what to do, but no one's getting any residuals out of that work.

And so I think that that is kinda where the biggest problem exists, is that there's gonna be a lot of erasure, right?

And I think that it's astute of us all to question as much of it as possible.

- [Questioner] Hi.

- What's up?

- My name's Akeem Shaheed.

You saved 40K and went to Africa.

I'm from here.

Like, it's not easy to go to Africa or to somewhere or it's.

- [Blitz] Not easy to go to Africa, my brother.

- No, no, I get that.

- [Blitz] I'm with you, I'm with you.

- I make stuff, but how do you, how did you get your scene?

How did you feel confident enough to, I don't know, to publish it for Ava DuVernay to see, or Beyonce?

- Well let me tell you what it is.

First of all, it is seeing beauty within you and around you.

I think that's a big challenge that certainly black, brown, indigenous people face is that we're not taught that our environments, our personhood, our peoplehood, our worlds are beautiful.

And I'm talking about beautiful.

Okay?

And so we're always out trying to shoot something else.

We're always out trying to do something else, as opposed to going, Cleveland's beautiful, my neighborhood's beautiful.

Yeah, it might be trash over there, but it's beautiful still, you know?

And for me, that was it for me, going to Ghana.

Most people will flee from making a film in Africa, 'cause they just go, it's not beautiful.

No one wants to see that.

I've always grown knowing that we're beautiful people, in all our complexities and all our inconsistencies we're beautiful people.

And my job is to turn the camera on that beauty and find that beauty.

And once I was able to capture that, bro you couldn't stop me.

I was ready to show up.

I had literally bought a projector, 'cause lemme also tell you this part of the story I left out.

No film festival would take my movie.

I sent that.

I'm gonna name all of them.

Sundance, rejected it, Nottingham, International, Con, everybody rejected my movie.

And again, back to what community means, right?

I went, well, I've toured the world.

I mean, I've played 30 plus countries, these people loved my music.

I think they'll love my movie too.

So I went to these much, much, much, much smaller festivals they tell you it is not worth submitting to.

I did a tiny one in New York, Urban World, did a tiny one in Sao Paulo, and I did all these smaller festivals, but I showed up and I supported my work, and I was confident, 'cause I knew that I'd captured beauty of my people.

And I think that just that self-awareness to go, this here is critical and the world has to see it.

I mean, it's the same reason hip hop music made it, because we had something beautiful.

Again, was it perfect?

No.

Was it rough around it, was it brash?

Was it all these things?

Yes, it was these things, but we were so confident in it, that there's no corner of this planet that hip hop does not resonate.

And it comes out of that confidence.

So I say that to say, as you're thinking of doing your work, man, the work is first inner work, right?

That just goes, I know my people, I know what we have.

I know it's infinitely beautiful and the world needs to see this.

And I will not stop.

Listen, I'm telling you, I was never going to stop.

First of all, I spent all my money on it.

So I didn't have a choice, but I was never going to stop.

This film was going to be seen.

And the universe works that way when you're so clear-eyed and so sure.

It's less chasing and more attracting what is yours, right?

And those calls came in, all the big calls came in.

But it was because we had created something that was worth people migrating to.

And that's the only real thing I can tell anybody who has any creative plans, anything.

It's just focus on just the thing, and make sure that it's so incredible that even if it's under a rock, lemme tell you, the world has always migrated to us to find us, okay?

Like, you know how dangerous it was to go to Harlem to listen to jazz back in the day?

The world migrated there.

If they hear of what you're doing in Cleveland, they will come find you.

The world will come find it, doesn't matter where you are.

And then forget it, that now we have tools to share our work around the world, the world is gonna find you.

So please believe, and believe in that.

(audience applauds) Hello.

- Good afternoon.

Hey, my name is Dawn Mays.

I'm the director of Design Entrepreneurship and Inclusion at Kent State University.

I'm also a Fam U grad.

Shout out to the Rattlers.

- [Blitz] Kent state in the house.

(audience cheers) Oh, it's a whole squad.

I didn't know that.

- So my question to you, in academia it is not necessarily celebrated being multifaceted, to pick one, right?

And so I would just ask, what is your advice to young, up and coming creative professionals, how can they begin the process of expanding their creative horizons by becoming multifaceted and not limited to just one particular thing?

- Such a brilliant question.

And look, I'll tell you that is the antithesis of creativity, right?

Which is like, yeah, you do one thing, stay in that lane.

We hear that a lot.

Stay in your lane, right?

I think it is one of the hardest things that we've all kind of had to accept as a reality, which is untrue, it's a deep falsehood.

We are never one thing.

It's just impossible.

Some of us are brilliant chefs.

Whether you cook for just yourself and your family, that's what you do, too.

Some of us are therapists for our friends, brilliant therapists by the way.

We listen, we are able to give advice, we're a multiplicity of things.

We're always gonna be that.

The question is, do you honor it?

That's all.

Do you honor these many things that you are?

And what levels of curiosity do you build?

I always tell folks I have zero real talent that I can really speak of, except curiosity.

Boy, I am curious.

If they say, "This is how this thing worked," I wanna know how it works.

I wanna know.

I mean, that was me as a kid.

I took apart every toy.

They stopped buying me anything, 'cause I'll break it.

I'll open it.

And that was a lot of us too.

Let's not forget.

This is how we all begun.

We're breaking stuff, trying to figure out how it worked.

And I think that as you grow older, it gets beat out of you.

It gets extracted out of you.

And then here's that one degree that you have to have.

Here's that one thing you have to study.

Look, again, shout out to Kent.

The beautiful thing about my college experience was changing my major every two weeks.

I kid you guys not, I did architecture, I bounced, I did interior design, I bounced, I did fashion design, I bounced, I did my, I bounced, I listen any class, I was like, what y'all doing in here?

I want to know.

Not for me, and I did it, and did it, and did it, let me tell you guys something.

That is how I arrived here, when I'm on a set and my production designer shows me I can understand what all the interior elements are because of that two weeks I was in that class and the stuff I learned.

So I say that to say, let's, like, and again, I know you get a bad rap, and they call you scatterbrained, and they call you all these things.

That, again, is a society that wants to mold you into a cog and a simple tool to perform one task that the system needs you to do.

And I also have to be clear, it ain't for everybody, okay?

Some people are just also good at just one thing, and are brilliant at it, and just know how to do that, and that's fine too.

But if you have that restless spirit, and you know yourself better than anybody else does, build that curiosity up.

Go around, travel, go to places, try new foods.

Find new friends, go to cities you've never been to, watch movies that none of your friends like, listen to songs that everybody thinks is whack, but you like, that was me throughout, was just always going, "I think I like that," and "I wanna know how that works."

And at some point you find yourself just having such a base of knowledge.

And here's the beautiful part, and I should say this, there are no wasted experiences.

There's not one.

You will always find yourself, whether it's in, you know, I have a 14 year old son.

Whether it's raising my son and giving all these things that I've picked up across so many plays that I was like, I think I'm wasting my time here, all kind of came together as things that have helped me be a full fledged human.

And I think that's the one thing that we have to always remember.

We are here first to be full fledged humans.

That's our first real job.

Everything else is ancillary and just helps us get there.

Sorry, I know that was long-winded, but I hope I landed that.

Thank you.

- That was beautiful.

- We outta time?

Oh man, we could have gone on for a while.

(audience applauds) Thank you, thank you.

- Thank you.

Thank you to Blitz Bazawule for coming back to Cleveland.

(audience applauds) - [Blitz] Thank you, thank you all.

- And sharing your brilliance, your insight, and most importantly, your honesty.

- Thank you.

- Thank you to Nwaka Onwusa for being such a fabulous - Come on, come on.

- Incredible moderator.

- Come on, come on, come on.

- Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at thecityclub.org, I'm sorry, at cityclub.org.

Today's forum is also presented in partnership with Futureland, with support from MCPC and part of the City Club's health equity series supported by The St. Luke's Foundation.

If you haven't heard, the City Club has moved to Playhouse Square.

You can check out their new space at the community open house and City Club annual meeting on Friday, October 27th.

Craig Hassel, president and CEO at Playhouse Square will be in conversation with City Club CEO Dan Moulthrop, who tells me nobody knows him, but everybody knows him, about the intersection of free speech and the art of the spoken word.

Immediately following the forum, you are all invited to join the City Club for a free celebration with music, food, and drinks from 1:00-4:00.

You can learn about this open house and other forums at cityclub.org.

Thank you again, Blitz and Nwaka.

(audience applauds) - Thank you Bakari.

- This is such an honor.

- And thank you Members and friends of the City Club and Futureland.

I'm Bakari Kitwana and this forum is now adjourned.

(bell chimes) (upbeat music begins) - For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(digital chime swells) - [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Idea Stream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.