Director Jenkins selects Indie Memphis winners
Memphis writer Jamey Hatley and New York-based poet and filmmaker Raven Jackson are the winners of the Indie Memphis fellowships for screenwriting selected by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of “Moonlight” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
“As an artist, I’ve always admired Memphis and what it’s meant to Black artistry across many forms and genres,” said Jenkins, in a statement. “To partner with Indie Memphis in supporting Jamey Hatley and Raven Jackson in taking the next steps in their quest to creatively engage and contribute to the diaspora is an honor most high.”
Hatley, a Prose Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts whose work has appeared in Oxford American and the story anthology “Memphis Noir,” among other sources, was selected by Jenkins as the recipient of Indie Memphis’ first Black Filmmaker Fellowship for Screenwriting, which includes a $7,500 unrestricted cash grant (funded by Jenkins). This fellowship goes to Memphis-area applicants; finalists included Munirah Safiyah Jones and Nubia Yasin.
Hatley was selected for her proposed screenplay for “The Eureka Hotel,” based on her story-essay “Always Open, the Eureka Hotel,” which appeared in Strange Horizons, an online magazine of speculative fiction (a designation that includes all forms of science fiction and fantasy).
“People in the South aren’t detached from the speculative and the strange and the magical,” said Hatley, 46. “That’s what gives Southern stories a lot of their richness — when they’re told by Southerners.”
She said her screenplay will be set during the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike and in part inside the now razed Eureka Hotel on Mulberry, but it adds a folkloric, magical element to the conventional history.
A longtime writer of fiction and nonfiction, Hatley said she never had tried writing a screenplay until recently. “Barry Jenkins is really one of my favorite filmmakers, and I’m so grateful he gave Memphis an opportunity,” she said.
Jackson, a Tennessee native now in the film program at New York University, was selected as the winner of the second Indie Memphis Black Filmmaker Residency for Screenwriting, for her proposed feature, “all dirt roads taste of salt.” Jackson was selected from a group that also included three finalists and five semi-finalists.
The residency award provides a $7,500 unrestricted cash grant along with two months of housing in Midtown, round-trip travel accommodations and other forms of assistance, to enable Jackson to move here and write. The grant is supported by the Remembering George Riley Fund, established in honor of Riley, a Memphis-born lawyer who worked on civil rights and social justice cases in his hometown and San Francisco before dying of leukemia at 59 in 2016.
In the case of both awards, the hope is that the recipients will be able to develop and even complete a screenplay for a movie that can be shot in Memphis.
The participation of Jenkins — one of the world’s most esteemed active filmmakers — instantly raised the profile and prestige of the fellowships. Jenkins’ involvement was coordinated by Miriam Bale, Indie Memphis’ artistic director and programmer.