Director, Kevon Pryce left the Bronx for Atlanta when he was a teenager. But that cross coast relocation didn’t stop the Jamaican-American filmmaker from storytelling about life in his borough of origin.
Pryce’s 2019 narrative short ‘Around the Block’ centers a low-income Bronx teenage boy who grapples with questions about his future. As his mother pressures him to be upright and outstanding, Pryce’s nameless protagonist ‘The Boy’ awaits a life-changing admissions decision from a prestigious boarding school and is peer-pressured by a friend to rob a nearby home.
Pryce visualizes the moral quandaries of The Boy’s specific coming of age through a tapestry of stylized visual sequences. We witness The Boy in his mother’s home under oozing, leaky ceiling, in the corner store under the shop owner’s casually surveilling eye, in the home of an absent, wealthy stranger as the quiet possibility of getting caught looms around waste baskets of cocaine kilos and jewelry vanities all the same.
For Pryce, making the “shoe-string budget” short in New York with SCAD film peers like producer Thang Ho, was a life-changing experience. In conversation with Atlanta Filmmaker Residence, Jonathan Banks, Pryce admitted that being on the ‘Around the Block’ confirmed that “filmmaking” is what Pryce “is supposed to do in this life” and inspired a deeper compassion within the filmmaker for people. “Making this film made me more understanding, why people do what they do for real for real.”
The film’s ambiguous and effectively chilling ending reflects Pryce’s desire to translate that compassion and life’s subversive ironies to his own narratives. Pryce is currently in development for a short film set and set to shoot in his family’s hearth of Jamaica.
