Woke

I’ve always had this fantasy that I could be a rapper. Growing up in Atlanta in the early 2000s, my heroes were Ludacris, Young Joc, and T-Pain long before they became Amir Khan and Spike Lee. Any song that had its own dance move was a particular favorite - I built my middle school reputation on my skill at Crip Walking and snapping my fingers to “Lean wit It, Rock wit It” at friends’ bar mitzvahs.

When Leland Frankel sent me his short play Woke, I naturally leaped at the chance to play MC Sunny Q, a wannabe rapper with more heart than flow. But it wasn’t just Sunny’s swagger and dreams of hip-hop stardom that drew me to the part - I immediately connected with the text’s nuanced exploration of identity and cultural appropriation. Most stories that I see about South Asian-American characters focus on their relationship with the old world. Woke, by contrast, is about the present and the future. How do we shape our lives when we seem destined to fulfill a specific societal niche everywhere we go? And how do we interact with those who claim to be allies, but who still continue to do harm without realizing it?

After performing in the play, I knew that I needed to adapt it as a short film. While the original story took place in Queens, my ambition was to film Woke back in my hometown. That meant making some serious changes to the story. Leland is a New Yorker by birth, and I had to help guide him through the nuances of Southern life for this new version. Rebecca, initially written as Caucasian, became African-American. The core conflict shifted from the failings of white allyship to the frequently tempestuous relationship between races in one of the nation’s largest majority minority cities. Sunny’s struggle began to mirror my own as a dark-skinned, first-generation Indian-American man raised in the South. All of Rebecca’s comments about the nature of rap and graffiti, her frustration at Sunny’s masculine posturing, were further sharpened. The more authentic to the city of Atlanta we strove to be, the more I felt that we could capture the genuine nature of these complex racial dynamics.

This project feels essential because there are so few non-white, non-black narratives about Southern life. What makes a person’s identity unique is an amalgamation of experiences, and nowhere is that felt keener than in Atlanta. As minorities within minorities, we constantly ask ourselves the question: “How do I fit into a country that sees us as different no matter where we are?” I’m not sure I have decided on a personal answer yet, but I believe Woke is an important example of a character who discovers his answer and some semblance of understanding.

My hope is that audiences will find Woke funny, heart-breaking, and eye-opening in equal measure. I know that the experience of creating this short film has certainly been all of those things for me.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

Sincerely,

Venk Potula
venk.khrisp@gmail.com
(404) 271-5487