From 2011 until 2018. 2018 was the last time I filmed with any of the participants. And then some of the Ghana protest stuff [was filmed] in 2021.

We call them video diaries: I provided the little video camcorders—portable camcorders—and then just told [the participants], “We would love to have you film parts of your life. Whatever you think is interesting or fun.” So not too many parameters. It was very open-ended and really interesting because each one of them used the video diaries differently. As documenters of their own lives, their works were distinctly different. Originally, the reason we used the video diaries was that I was living in LA when I started the film. I would go from LA to New York or Boston, to film for a bit and then leave. And I felt I was missing a lot of the beginnings of the adjustments [the students made to] foreign culture. The participants helped us document what was going on. There’s an interesting quality in the footage that they provided. They got to be themselves in ways that were different from when I was [filming] them. 

Well, I knew I wanted to work with MIT students from the same class. I realized it’d be more powerful to see the same people go through college and see how they change through that experience. So I wanted to basically start with one class—the class of 2015—and then film them until graduation. Of course, later on, we followed them a little bit beyond graduation, which was special. But I wanted to work with MIT students because I knew MIT. I had gone through my [own] MIT experience. I wanted to work with Africans coming directly from the African continent. I sent an introductory letter to the admitted [African] students in the class of 2015. I think there were 12 that had accepted MIT’s admission offer. Eight of them responded to my initial query. And so we started communicating via email and phone to learn when they were arriving in Boston, when to arrange to meet them and start filming them. 

We [narrowed the list of students] down to four for a couple of reasons. One is I was looking for participants who could take the project in stride, and I wanted to make sure that the project wasn’t a distraction from their main reason for being in Boston: college. For some of the participants who ended up dropping out, it was a matter of the level of comfort with the intimacy that the film required. Because I felt like it was important to see [the students back] home as well—to meet [their] homes and meet [their] families. [The final four] ended up offering us a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds. Ultimately, everybody kind of provided a different, complementary piece of the puzzle. And so I was just really excited about how that panned out. 

The biggest change that I can think of in terms of the cultural landscape or the world in general is this: I think the [African] participants in the film kind of more easily or more quickly understood the Black struggle in America. My explanation for that has to do with social media. You know, when I was in college, we didn’t have videos of police brutality and of the microaggressions and the macroaggressions that happened to Black people on a daily basis. Whereas the participants in my film [did]. Because there are all these conversations across the continents. Ghana in particular has done this thing of trying to invite the African diaspora back onto the African continent through the Year of Return, your end-of-year celebrations and activities and tourism and all of that. Those are examples of how much cross-pollination or conversation there is among African Americans and Africans. There is more awareness of struggles and maybe how they’re interlinked, how each of us is personally affected by the other’s struggles. So I would say that’s one of the most striking differences [between then and now].

It’s definitely something I was looking out for. And I think even if I wasn’t, you know, it would have maybe crept in. But I was definitely interested in that because it’s most Black Africans’ experience of America. You know, stepping away from home and coming here. But I was trying to figure out: what is the new thing that [my] film could add to the conversation? Because there are lots of films that address American racism and trace its history and its present. And so it didn’t seem adequate to just show racism. It’s one of the things that makes America difficult and unpleasant and inconvenient and maybe dangerous. And so it’s one of the palpable forces that may be pushing people back [to Africa]. So the way I was thinking about structuring the film was in terms of the arc of one’s relationship with home and what everyone’s mission is, or the mission of youthful idealism. 

Initially, all the participants were on a mission to get the skills [at MIT] and then go back home. But racism is rearing its head. In the first couple of years, it’s an inconvenient thing that just needs to be tolerated. [You tell yourself that] you’re just here for four years and it’s a nuisance, right? “These [racist Americans] are ridiculous. You know, I’m fully capable. You’re acting like I scammed my way into this institution. You’re the fool. I just need to ignore you for four years, and then I’m out.” But then in the halfway point of the film, probably around Fidelis’s trip [back home] to Zimbabwe, I think the [students] come to the realization that their time in the US might have to be longer than four years. “Either we’re going to take jobs on or we’re going to study more or we’re going to have to actually get more skills or real-world expertise, or make connections and network, and take on American jobs before we go back home. Or we make lives here [in the United States].” And so then racism is not just an inconvenience, but it is something you have to wrestle with [on a more permanent basis], and you have to make a decision about how you’re going to deal with it.  

And I think Sante is the one who most explicitly takes that on. She’s the one marching in the streets [in the film]. So the students [actively] contributed to the fight against racism in America.

After college, when I was working, one of my closest friends was African-American, and we would have really intimate conversations about his experiences as a Black man in America. [At first] I could not understand what he meant [when he said that] he would walk in a room and instantly start counting how many Black people [were in the room]. I, as an African, did not have that burden [in Africa]. But in the film, the journey [of confronting racism in the United States] happened much faster [for the students, who were determined] not to be bystanders [but to] join the fight against [racism]. So I felt that that was the role of the film, to show how that transformation [into active antiracist] happens. It’s about making a decision about what you’re going to do. Personally, it was about linking the roots of American racism—white supremacy and colonialism—[to what is happening today], including the homophobia that I’m trying to find safety from, and that I had to navigate very uncomfortably as a queer kid in Ghana. 

So those things [racism and homophobia] have common roots. And so I wanted to tie them together, especially because I’m a Black gay man in America—and a Black gay African also.

The film is a study of how youthful idealism gets tested by things going on in the world. By the specifics of the individual backgrounds that people come from, and then by their desires for their adult lives. So let’s track the times that they’re living in and what’s going on and how that’s shaping and applying pressure on that youthful idealism.

What I wanted to talk about [in the film] is really how American society has a specific gaze on Black people that is one of suspicion. And no matter how strong you are as a person, that does affect you. It makes the self-doubt, the insecurity that Black people feel much worse. [The film also addresses] suspicion towards women in engineering spaces. [One] sequence focuses on Sante specifically because she’s the one woman among the participants that we followed closely, and then she’s Black. So the gaze of suspicion is twofold—it’s doubling. I think that Sante has a very specific constitution as a person. From the get-go, she was never afraid to speak her mind or to ask questions that others might deem uncomfortable, and to really speak out about things that she thought just didn’t make sense. She was very brave about how she carried herself in general. And that’s a quality I learned.

When we traveled home with Sante, I realized through the stories that her family told that she has always been this strong-willed person who has a very strong sense of self and clarity in terms of how she’s gone about changing educational opportunities [for women] in Tanzania. Her dad actually told the story of when she was a kid [and the family considered] changing their last name to honor a male ancestor in his village. And [Sante’s] brothers went along with it. But she refused to change her name—Nyambo—and her dad talked about how, when he thought about it, that was actually really appropriate because the name Nyambo was the name of a female ancestor who was also very strong-willed and was very well-known in that community. 

It emerged gradually, although there were hints of it from the very first [cut]. I didn’t think I had to be in this film. But even in that very first cut, we included moments like where Fidelis turns the camera on me. But I wasn’t a full character. It was just kind of an acknowledgment that, OK, there’s a filmmaker here. I think I was always drawn to those moments because they had an energy to them that was really compelling. But the film [was always going to] be about the four lives that I followed in real-time through college. [There was] a long editing process. [During that time] the bill got introduced in Ghana targeting LGBTQ people and I started protesting in New York and in other countries around the world. [That] forced me to basically confront my own estrangement from Ghana. And why I felt uncomfortable whenever I got on a plane to go visit home for a couple of weeks. And it clicked for me what my role could be and I realized I had to take a cue from the participants and be as vulnerable as they had been throughout the years [of filming]. And those moments where the camera was reversed on me or, you know, there was a conversation across the lens, even if I wasn’t on screen—those moments belong because, in some ways, the film had always been shot as a collaboration. How do you piece together an identity when you’re shaped by [different] places and all these pressures? 

It was great that Fidelis brought it up. Actually, he brought it up on multiple [occasions]. There were several other scenes that didn’t make it into the film. Ultimately, the couple of scenes that we included were enough to show the progression of his thoughts or opinions on gay people. I thought that, for a film that was tracing how people change, it was such a clear moment of growth and change. 

I think that’s one of the beautiful things about the college experience in America: even in an engineering school, even at a place like MIT, you’re forced to take humanities courses. I took some music classes. I took writing classes. I took political science classes. So it’s an opportunity to kind of expand your horizons. 

I always loved writing. I loved writing before I got to MIT. I wrote in high school, as well. And I was part of the drama club in high school—the drama club defined my high school experience. We used to write our own plays and put them on. I grew up in Ghana from when I was 3 until 19, and I didn’t get to travel anywhere else on the continent. During that time, I think the only time I stepped out of Ghana to anywhere else in Africa was across the border, the northern border in Paga, to go into Burkina for a day trip. So being invited by all the families [in Brief Tender Light] to either live with them or close to them—to be invited into their lives and their communities really gave me this beautiful experience of seeing four different [African] countries, with their different histories, their different realities, their different governments. That was a big blessing and a beautiful thing.

If somebody invites you, with a camera, into their life and you just stay with them and pay attention, you’ll get something really compelling about what makes them tick, what they are about, no matter who the person is. And so my whole philosophy about making this film was: be guided by the things, by the questions, I was interested in exploring, but also just see where people take you and invite you. 

That’s the exciting thing about the film for me, and that’s what I was chasing from the very beginning. That’s what I meant by wanting to make a story about a more complex Africa. Africans have a sense of pride. We have our sense of ambition. We’re complex, complicated people. We’re not looking for crumbs and we’re not looking to be “saved.” 

I think for me it was about distilling the lesson that I have learned. I believe less in “saviors” or somebody who says, “I alone can fix this problem.” I believe in everybody contributing. Because I think if all of us contribute a little bit as citizens, then we can create better societies for all of us, and that improvement can be more long-lasting. I think there’s a lot of power in collectively stepping up as citizens and not relying on one person—on somebody who’s going to be the MLK who gets assassinated or the LGBT rights activist in Uganda who gets murdered.

I’ll tell you the story of how it came about. For a couple of years, I was editing the film, trying to refine the rough cut and raise some funding, and during that time I was trying to figure out the structure and I came across a lecture by a documentary [expert] who said that even if you have multiple characters in your film, you can only have one protagonist, and that protagonist sometimes is not a person. It’s an idea or phenomenon. And that was the moment when a light bulb went on in my head. And I realized that [my film] is about this question of how youthful idealism grows up, and whether it can survive the process of growing up. So that became an organizing principle for me. It was the central protagonist, and we were exploring this protagonist’s journey into maturation through the lives of these four students I wanted to come up with a title that pointed to that a little bit and also set the right tone for the film. I was brainstorming and I came up eventually with “The Brief Tender Light of Youthful Idealism,” which is a mouthful, and so I decided on Brief Tender Light. 

“One Day I Too Go Fly” was the original working title for the film. And now it’s the name of my production company. [Brief Tender Light] was really about capturing the voices of young African students who have this ambition in life to participate in everything cutting-edge, to contribute to it, but also to see the world.

The mission of [my production company] is really to celebrate African stories. To make films that reveal or represent and celebrate Africa in a world that’s global. It’s about revealing, representing, and celebrating Africans.