Fevah, the short film by award-winning filmmaker and New York Film Academy (NYFA) Chair of Screenwriting Randall Dottin, screened at the Latino Film Festival last month. Shortly before the screening, Dottin was interviewed on WNYC by cultural critic Rebecca Carroll.
Fevah is a 12-minute-long short about a single Latinx mother named Indira, who deals with emotional and psychological angst while navigating her feelings about the two black men she loves. The film, which stars Melissa Jackson, Russell Hornsby, and LaRoyce Hawkins, was written and directed by Dottin.
Dottin is currently the Chair of NYFA’s Screenwriting department at its New York City campus. His thesis film, A-Alike, won a Gold Medal at the Student Academy Awards for Best Narrative Film and the Director’s Guild of America Award for Best African American Student Filmmaker, as well as earning other awards and a two-year broadcast run on HBO. His feature doc The Chicago Franchise was accepted into IFP Week’s Spotlight on Documentaries.
Dottin recently won a grant from the Sundance Institute to complete his six-part documentary series The House I Never Knew, which focuses on the struggle with and against the negative effects of housing segregation policy, including social ills like gun violence and educational failure—especially in Boston, Houston, and Chicago—as well as the personal lives affected by them.
On air with WNYC, New York’s public broadcast network, Dottin went into the making of Fevah, as well as what helped inspire the film. “I think one of the things that makes New York so special is just the fact that it’s the most diverse city in the world,” Dottin told Carroll during his interview. “It’s crowded. But it’s also so much culture. It’s also so many different kinds of people.”
Fevah screened on August 17 at the Julia de Burgos Art Center as part of the New York Latino Film Festival (NYLFF). The fest was founded in 1999, aims to build audiences for Latinx cinema, support the film community with professional development, and foster relationships for Latino talent.
New York Film Academy congratulates Chair of Screenwriting Randall Dottin on his NYLFF screening and encourages everyone to listen to his enlightening WNYC interview.