The Butterfly Effect

BY RACHEL CARGLE PHOTOGRAPHY BY KOBE WAGSTAFF STYLING BY STUDIO&

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT awards commemorate the kind of milestones that Marsai Martin is breezing through. In 2019, the Black-ish actor made history as the youngest executive producer on a major Hollywood production with the film Little, and was featured on the celebrated TIME100 Next list. At just 18 years old, she has been awarded a total of 11 NAACP Image Awards and nominated for two Screen Actors Guild Awards. Last November, Fantasy Football —a film she not only starred in but also produced—was released on Netflix. But Martin is not simply knocking down barriers for her own fulfillment—she is building a legacy to inspire young women around the world.

Martin joined me on a very dreary afternoon in New York over Zoom from what appeared to be a much more vibrant locale. Her face was fresh— an unexpected vessel for the clear and considered sophistication that pours from her—and her spirit light. It must have been this same prodigious energy that inspired Michelle Obama to tap Martin to work on the Obama Foundation’s Get Her There, an initiative that ensures adolescent girls have access to education. The former First Lady asked the young actor to produce and co-direct the campaign’s launch video, and Martin delivered, taking the project as an opportunity to braid together her burgeoning craft and her desire to enact change.

“For her to trust me and to be able to co-direct it as well was amazing,” Martin tells me. The video is a gorgeous montage of young girls filmed in their various home countries. Each repeats the prompt “Dear 25-year-old me, I hope you are…” before relaying her dreams and aspirations: becoming a tattoo artist, saving lives as a cardiologist, making movies, or being the best optician in Uganda.

“I wanted to make sure we heard stories from girls all around the world—to show that we all want the same thing, and that’s to have the chance to strive for what we love and the dreams that we can accomplish,” says Martin. “Every day we walk down the street passing strangers or meeting new people, and each of us is uniquely the same. I wanted everybody’s stories to feel relatable and impactful at the same time.”

Such is a recurring theme throughout Martin’s work, from her role as the erudite but unfiltered Diane Johnson on Black-ish to her performance as the competitive Callie Coleman in Fantasy Football: an insistence not just on seeing but celebrating the complexities of girlhood. Nowhere, though, is that drive more prevalent than in Saturdays, her most recent project for Disney Channel. The forthcoming show centers on Paris, a young Black girl played by Danielle Jalade, and the eclectic ecosystem that is her local roller-skating rink. Martin, who is producing the show, explains to me that it is a nostalgic nod to the era of Disney that she and her cousins grew up loving—series like That’s So Raven and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody —but with an added layer. Paris navigates the social scene and indulges her passion for skating all while managing her sickle cell disease, an aspect of the real world Martin felt was missing in young adult entertainment. “Even though it’s a story about family and the beauty of friendship and community, there are different layers to it,” she says. “We wanted to highlight that having a sickness isn’t gonna bring you down. It doesn’t stop you from living your best life and doing what you love, especially as a young girl.”

Saturdays sees Martin move from where we all met her—in front of the camera, charming audiences—to a role behind the scenes, a shift that requires new skills from the young creative. “It has allowed me to use my voice in a new way,” she says. “It feels good to see your vision come to life in a space that you’re not in.” The process wasn’t always easy, though—Martin often struggled with the challenges of production. “You’re not only pleasing your own needs, but also making sure Disney and the cast and crew get what they want. It’s how I imagine it feels to be a new mom: you’re learning your way through it while trying to take care of this thing, making sure it grows up, and then you just let it go. You let it live, you let it dream, and you let people see what you’ve created.”

Throughout our conversation, I can’t help but see a connection between the message of the Get Her There campaign and the actor’s own success after being seen, supported, and celebrated. What is it that “got you here?” I ask. Martin got her start at five years old while posing for family portraits at a mall kiosk. The photographer, impressed by how well she took direction, offered her parents a discount if they promised to enroll her in acting classes. “You would be truly shocked at how the smallest decisions might make a difference,” Martin says. “How far each one could take you. That’s what I’ve learned from considering all the what-ifs.”

When I ask Martin what advice she’d give her own future self, she squirms in her chair through the computer screen. “Oh no, girl, this is tough. I really don’t allow myself to think that far ahead,” she exhales. Martin thinks for a moment, before offering: “I hope you’re happy and that your family is healthy. I hope your shows and films have impacted people and helped them open up about their own stories, hopefully creating little chain reactions around the world.”

BY CAT DAWSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIANA NAGIRNYAK

AWARDS SEASON COMMENCES with the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale, the first of a flurry of major film festivals that take place throughout the year. While the oldest have Nationalist roots—Venice’s was founded by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1932, and Berlin’s was initially funded by the U.S. military—annual presentations like these have historically skewed progressive: pushing cinema forward by showcasing new voices and amplifying projects that might not otherwise find an audience.

They are also crucial to the entertainment ecosystem. Festivals are accompanied by energetic markets, at which films and series—especially those made by independent producers who are responsible for the vitality of the medium—are acquired for distribution. But since content streaming platforms (SVODs to those in the business, “streamers” to the rest of us) disrupted this ecosystem 15 years ago, industry doomers have been bracing for the demise of the studio system and the independent film festival. Of course, streamers have fundamentally changed the film and TV industry, transforming how content is licensed and consumed. But the impact of streaming—first on distribution, then later on development and production— is actually far more nuanced than many might think.

Streamers have enabled substantial expansion in the number of opportunities available to early-career filmmakers and, according to the Berlinale’s artistic director Carlo Chatrian, have also resulted in far larger production budgets. Cara Cusumano, the Tribeca Film Festival’s festival director and VP of programming echoes this sentiment, noting that streamers “put more pressure on festivals” to identify new talent. But they’ve also augmented the criteria for the films that make their way onto festival slates. Streaming has transformed how we discover films, replacing more traditional forms of browsing with algorithms that assess behavioral data to put content in front of viewers that they’ll readily consume. Chatrian and Cusumano both add that the emphasis streaming companies place on funding projects that they anticipate will have broad audience appeal has discouraged experimentation in form and narrative. This means that the Netflix catalog that viewers encounter today, which is full of direct-tostreaming projects, is less diverse than it might have been in the past. Still, original narratives are what keep the medium relevant, and identifying them is the central struggle of streamers and studios alike—a challenge that is becoming more pronounced as streaming platforms flood the market and as social media and gaming compete for audiences’ time and attention.

Original stories do, however, consistently find their first key audience at film festivals. But what, precisely, counts as original stories is both difficult to pinpoint and the subject of ongoing debate. Chatrian cites Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans as an example of the power of anachronism—of using older techniques and narratives that, perhaps paradoxically, feel fresh, an innovative strategy that has also proven successful in other industries (take Kehinde Wiley’s citations of the Old Masters, or Alessandro Michele’s nostalgic designs for Gucci). The hunt for original material has also compelled festival programmers to reach beyond cinema’s conventions by offering “immersive” or extended reality (XR) sections; but a survey of such programming, which differs at every festival, suggests that XR content has yet to effectively intersect with film and TV or to connect with audiences in lasting ways.

Nevertheless, it’s indie filmmakers whose relentless innovations in narrative and form ensure the continued relevance of Sundance, the Berlinale, and other major festivals on the circuit. For creatives like Christine Vachon, whose production company Killer Films has been developing raw, cutting-edge projects since it debuted the generation-defining Kids in 1995, festivals remain a crucial avenue for alternative films to enter the critical discourse. She insists that there is no formula for cinematic success—“you know it when you see it.” The fact that many streamers now offer access to award-winning projects from specific festivals—Netflix has individual channels for Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival—signals that independent storytelling and the festivals that champion it will continue reaching for originality, even as the financial and data-driven structures of SVODs might appear to discourage it.

This landscape of heterogeneous incentive structures is an early indication of impending tectonic shifts in the industry, but unlike the apocalyptic projections of many, it’s likely to be one in which the role of film festivals and their symbiotic relationships with indie producers is more important than ever.