One For My Baby

I remember following my dad early in the morning along the Lakefront (This is probably the reason the Lakefront ends up the protagonist in so many of my films.) I was so tired then but I could never be annoyed with him. He made things like discomfort seem so necessary. He would be up the night before, painting in the living room shirtless and barefoot listening to music sometimes seemed to be going in a hundred directions, just like the colors and the brushstrokes and the shapes. He would improvise with glass, wood, wire, and whatever else could construct his vision. I never saw him use an easel, he was always crouched or bent over them, not noticing anything. During the days, flying kites infront of the Museum of Science and Industry, following him to the frame shop: what someone remembers is powerful. I never really saw him sleep.

One For My Baby is both a reconstruction of the events that brought me into this world and a eulogy for one of the people responsible: my father, Dale Conroy Washington. This film is my attempt to talk about love's true form and how this form changes and shifts with time. More than anything, I wanted to unmask the harmful force that masculinity has proven to be time and again wherever compassion is needed. The greatest privilage was to be able to revisit many of the places throughout Chicago's south side, historic to me and highly relevant to the story at hand: the South Shore neighborhood as well as the South Shore Cultural Center, the home of renowned art collector and good friend of my father's, Patric McCoy, and the 63rd Street Beach.

This film, which was the culmination of my four years of undergraduate studies in Columbia College Chicago's Filmmaking program, serves as my first contribution to the romance genre. Utilizing many of the influences I picked up along the way in the great filmmakers and writers from just about everywhere, we behind One For My Baby have made the most honest attempt at depicting events from my own life. I looked at a great deal of cinema from the 'L.A. Rebellion' filmakers like Charles Burnett and Larry Clarke; Cassavetes and Lynne Ramsey. Admitedly, it all began, visually, as a riff off of a scene Mira Nair's 'Mississippi Masala' where Denzel is walking backwards, talking to Sarita Choudhury. I remember saying to myself thay if I could capture a similar ease, I could somehow figure out my parents before me.

This film is the conversation I have always longed to have with my father; and one that my mother deserves. I wanted to make a film for the sake of healing and honesty. This is maybe a portrait of my father, the person, not the artist many people who knew him imagined. But maybe the person is inseperable from their art. I may like the second option a bit better. In the film, the art in which the characters find themselves surrounded by is circumstatial; but I did want to feel the weight of its presence.

'One For My Baby' has everything to do with being black. It has everything to do with being both a parent and a child; how much do our journies cost us, and how avoidable are our mistakes? I am hoping that the romance at this film's core, not its fate, is what stays with viewers the most.

For this black boy with big, cinematic dreams: this is a historic piece.

-Shiloh Tumo Washington, Writer and Director