The feeling of being hunted is at the center of NIGHT FIGHT. Accordingly, one of the challenges in creating this film is to capture and document our ongoing, wrenching conversations with our individual selves as Black people in America—the cataloging of our fears, our rage, and the discomforting assessment of the viability of our optimism. Post-Reconstruction, post-Civil Rights, post-2020, post-January 6 insurrection, the most relevant inflection point involves the deeply personal choices each of us makes, wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of self-preservation.

I came of age in Camden, New Jersey in the 1980s. From that vantage point, I gained invaluable perspective on the relationship between racism and identity and my community's deeply coveted, but seldom recognized, humanity. I have worked hard in this project to develop an expressive structure in which the audience will encounter the weight of history as it often crashes down on, aims and fires on, or kneels on the necks of Black folk every day. To accomplish this, I have researched and experimented variously with African American folkloric traditions as well as the creative work of contemporary Black writers to forge an imaginative framework or *doorway* through which I can narratively/editorially lead the audience backwards and forwards in time.

The use of both nonfiction and fiction to explore the film's central ideas is also an imaginative outgrowth of my peculiar 2017 year. A year which began with my father's passing. A year in which I was pursued—on two separate occasions—by white men in pickup trucks. One occasion in broad daylight as I returned home from dropping my son at a day camp in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the other during a family reunion in Collingwood, Ontario as I returned from a pre-dawn writing session at the local Starbucks. Both events occurred just a few weeks from each other; the latter incident, the more intense of the two, happened just a few days before the "Unite the Right" rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia.