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“A Storybook Ending” is a short film about a Black man who kills an undercover white police officer in self-defense which initiates blackmail and murder. The Socio-critical short was written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Lanre Olabisi and portrays violence in the cities of America’s mundane life. Tiffany Smile and Ross Vedder are part of the production team and both worked on a lot of independent film projects.
“A short film about lasting problems: racism, police violence, and colorism.”
An interesting fact about the film is that it’s based on a real-life story that happened in 2015 to former Black tennis star James Blake. While he was waiting for a car in front of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, suddenly a plainclothes policeman attacked him for no reason. After that happened, the policeman reported that James Blake “fit the description”. The exact situation happened to the main character, Wale, in this Film. He’s played by Rotimi Paul who was working in the New York theatre scene which enabled him to get several roles in TV like in Bull (CBS) or Sleepy Hollow (FOX). Carra Patterson as “Claudia” is well known for her performance in the award-winning play “Jitney”, while Toni Ann Denoble’s (“Virginia”) solo shows Eulogy for Cookie was featured at Dixon Place main stage. Sawandi Wilson (“Gonzo”) can be seen on Netflix’s The House Of Flowers and Law & Order: SVU.
The short has been selected for the Woodstock Film Festival, American Black Film Festival, International Black Film Festival, and a lot more which shows the topic’s importance and society’s interest in it.
What Lanre Olabisi’s intention was is not to teach the audience what is right or wrong regarding the whole issue, but rather trigger people with tricky situations, and try to break existing stereotypes of people of color in our society. Showing them in a different way was one of the director’s main goals. Olabisi’s film doesn’t offer a solution for all of these social problems, but moreover makes his audience think about it and come to their own conclusions. “A storybook ending” is full of unexpected and shocking turns and fits more than ever in nowadays society which was proved by the latest Black Lives Matter debate.
