Morehouse student filmmakers pay tribute to Dr. King in new video

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - The voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. echoes through a short film produced by Morehouse College students.

Emerging filmmakers from the school’s Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies (CTEMS) program wrote, pitched, and produced the short from Dr. King’s 1967 speech inspiring future leaders to “Keep Moving.”

The project was in partnership with MTV Entertainment Studios.

“We’re all hurt we’re all battered especially following 2020 and the year after that, but we just have to get up and keep moving, that was like the main mantra of the entire commercial,” says Jalen Ellis a CTEMS student at Morehouse.

The student filmmakers wanted to amplify black images and stories we don’t often see on television.

“The most touching image for me was when the doors opened you see that black graduate come out, it reaffirms what I’m about to go through in terms of graduating and we get to see praise dancing even in a short film which is something we don’t often see in media,” says Justin Upshaw another CTEMS student who worked on the short.

Ellis adds, “what we did is try to go for something where we have people looking very professional, we had people who were nonbinary present it in it, we had graduates present in it, black scholarship and the idea of keep moving forward.”

The short spotlights the men of Morehouse, their peers, faculty, and alumni and helps fuel the pipeline for student filmmakers to enter the industry.

Dr. Stephane Dunn, one of the CTEMS professors says, “we need black filmmakers who are making it, to adopt us, adopt a black filmmaking program who is nurturing the storytellers who will be the diversity of tomorrow.”

“Places like USC are what they are because Spielberg put his name on a building there, so did George Lucas, now let’s make that happen at Dr. King’s alma mater, what better place to establish legacy than here,” Dunn says.

Watch the video here.

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