When I'm marketing a film, whether its mine or someone else's, I work with a great deal of strategy and elbow grease until the job is done.

For far too long, independent voices have been relegated to places where these ideas are not seen on a mass level.

Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.

I think it's a wonderful time to be a black woman who makes films. It's a good time to be an artist period. Traditional models of making and consuming art are breaking down and being rebuilt. I find that to be incredibly exciting as a filmmaker and film marketer.

We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.