Tell me yours & I'll Tell You Mine.

Tell Me Yours and I'll Tell You Mine is a story born from moments in my personal life, mixed with my imagination running wild about where things could have gone. It’s that feeling when someone is leading you on and you can’t tell if you’re scared or completely drawn in. And somehow, you're just there, following along. By the end, you’re left exposed, vulnerable, with all your secrets laid out like tarot cards on a table. I set it in Paris because this Black American jazz musician needed to be somewhere that felt dreamlike and dangerous. He meets this photographer and things get intense fast. I kept thinking about Giovanni's Room and how Baldwin captured all that longing in Paris, but I wanted to place it in the noir genre where these kinds of stories still have this allure of mystery and elegance. I've always been drawn to how those old films use shadows and psychological tension. There's something voyeuristic happening in this short, but it's subtle. When it comes to the queer elements, the musician isn't just one thing and neither is the photographer. They're both complicated, trying to read each other. There's definitely queer energy but I wasn't going to announce it with a bullhorn. Life's messier than that, especially when you set it in the past. Sexual labels often weren't spoken back then, but people still acted on desires. That cat and mouse attraction was more dangerous, grittier, rawer. There are many moments in this short including the tarot reading, the photo session, the bathtub scene which matter but they don't explain everything. Sometimes two people can shift all the power in a room without saying much. That's what fascinates me. Who's really calling the shots? The roles of submission and being active and how you can lean into those "roles" but it does not actually mean one is powerless and one is calling the shots. I also wanted to create a story where two characters from totally different worlds get tangled up together, and the one you'd expect to be the outsider ends up being the most relatable.