The prospect of adapting a noted scholar’s text was not an unintimidating one for Youmans, but he felt an immediate affinity for the work. “I was raised by my mother, a single Black woman,” he says, “and a lot of my work has been something of a vessel for the best qualities I saw in her: her fierce independence, her steadfastness.” His collaboration with Rankine has been a happy one: “She’s so dope. She’s funny, too.”
The potential impact of the work compelled him to leave Los Angeles, where he’s in the middle of filming his second feature, Magnolia Bloom, and fly to New York to take it on—despite the compressed timeline (just four weeks from start to finish) and the challenges of mounting a work during a pandemic. “This is a PSA,” he says. “It’s an artful approach to a conversation that is about creating agents of progressive change. This is a piece that allows people to come to their own conclusions and at the end of the day affirms a message of love.” There is “something bigger at stake here,” adds Poots—not just an optimistic step toward brighter days, but the chance to push forward a critical conversation at a critical moment.
November is streaming on TheShed.org starting on Sunday, November 1, at 8 p.m.. It will stream for free for one week only, through November 7.