Dear Mama | Contenders TV Nominees 2023
Dear Mama | Contenders TV Nominees 2023
Transcript
00:00 Hi, I'm Rosie Cordero, assistant TV editor at Deadline.
00:04 And today I'll be moderating the panel
00:06 for the incredible docu-series from FX, "Dear Mama."
00:10 It's my pleasure to introduce our panelists for today.
00:13 Alan Hughes, writer, director, and executive producer.
00:17 And Jamal Joseph, executive producer.
00:19 Hi guys, welcome and congratulations
00:21 on your nominations.
00:23 Thank you, hi Rosie.
00:24 Hi.
00:25 Glad to be here.
00:26 Thank you so much, Rosie.
00:27 Of course.
00:28 But before we begin, here's a look at "Dear Mama."
00:31 Could you please state your full name for the record?
00:35 Yes, Tupac Amaru Shakur.
00:38 Tupac Amaru is an Inca name.
00:40 The first Tupac Amaru was the last indigenous Inca chief
00:44 to be killed and martyred by the Spanish conquistadores who
00:49 came to invade the area of South America called Peru.
00:53 After that, another Tupac Amaru laid out plans
00:56 for the modern state of Peru.
00:59 Also killed and martyred by the Spanish people.
01:03 Tupac was conceived during the worst part of my life.
01:06 I was on trial for my life.
01:08 And I chose his name because I wanted my son
01:12 to understand that African-Americans are not
01:15 the only people that this has happened to.
01:19 I'm Afeni Shakur, and I'm Tupac's mom.
01:24 The grand jury has returned an indictment charging members
01:27 of the Black Panther Party with the conspiracy
01:30 to destroy elements of society which they regarded
01:34 as part of-- and I'm quoting the indictment--
01:37 "the power structure."
01:38 Before I became a parent, I chose to be
01:46 in the Black Panther Party.
01:49 Tupac stayed in my womb through health.
01:55 And the Black Panther Party helped me, number one,
01:59 to respect who my son was simply because of his birth.
02:06 A black male born in America in the 1970s
02:14 was my responsibility to teach Tupac
02:17 how to survive his reality.
02:20 Little baby Tupac, huh?
02:26 Little baby Tupac.
02:28 Now, I know you guys knew Tupac for a long time.
02:31 I'd love to know how you guys met Tupac.
02:36 What was your relationship like?
02:37 And when and why did you decide to make your mama?
02:42 Jamal?
02:44 Well, I knew Tupac when he was in the womb.
02:48 I'm one of the New York Panther 21.
02:51 So I joined the Black Panther Party when I was 15.
02:55 The first day I came into the Panther office thinking
03:00 that Dr. King had been assassinated,
03:04 I came in mad at the white power structure.
03:09 And I thought the Panthers were going to give me a gun
03:12 and send me on a mission to kill white people.
03:15 And instead, they gave me a stack of books
03:18 and let me know that it was about all-color people,
03:21 all power to the people meant power to black, white, brown,
03:25 red, yellow people.
03:26 And a fainted came up and asked me how old I was.
03:30 And I lied and said I was 16.
03:31 She said, you look like you're 13 years old.
03:33 Go home.
03:34 I didn't.
03:35 And she says, I'm going to keep my eye on you.
03:37 And from that moment on, she became my big sister.
03:40 And six months later, because I had
03:42 been promoted to a leader of the youth cadre,
03:46 I was arrested as part of that case, the New York Panther 21
03:48 case.
03:50 So I knew a faintee as she was carrying Tupac
03:53 through the Panther 21 trial and beyond for the rest of her life
03:57 and for Pac's life.
03:59 Wow.
04:01 How about you, Allen?
04:03 I met Tupac in early '91 on a music video adventure
04:09 for Digital Underground.
04:11 And he had seen our short films, my brother and I's short films.
04:14 And he wanted us to direct his first three music videos
04:19 off his debut album, Tupacalypse Now.
04:21 And we struck up--
04:22 he made good on that promise.
04:24 And we struck up an intense, creative friendship.
04:29 It felt like it was three years.
04:30 It was probably about a year.
04:33 And it produced a crown jewel in Brenda's Got a Baby.
04:39 And then the rest is kind of history.
04:42 And some of it's in the film, Dear Mama.
04:44 Shaq G, is it true that Shaq G is the one who discovered him?
04:49 Professionally, the first big name person
04:52 to really lay their eyes and shine that diamond up
04:57 was Shaq G, I would say.
04:58 Yeah.
04:59 Now, Jamal, you're part of this story, the story here
05:03 that plays out.
05:05 If you can give a little insight into--
05:06 I mean, there's been so many documentaries.
05:08 I've seen so many of them.
05:09 I was so captivated by this one.
05:11 You go back and forth beautifully
05:12 between these two stories.
05:14 And they interweave in many spaces.
05:16 Jamal, being especially that this is a big part of your life
05:20 history, what was it like to revisit this time
05:22 and kind of your guys' decision to tackle
05:25 this space in your documentary?
05:28 Well, in the beginning of a journey that
05:30 was a four-year journey, Alan and I
05:33 had a conversation, and his vision
05:34 is what really made me want to be a part of the story.
05:39 I always believed, and Alan also believed,
05:41 you couldn't really tell Tupac's story without understanding
05:44 who Ofeini was.
05:46 It would give you context.
05:47 And so we knew that it was going to be a deep journey
05:52 and a painful journey, but also one
05:53 that we hoped that as you got a better understanding of who
05:58 Tupac was and who Ofeini was, you
06:00 would understand Black America and all of America
06:03 at that time.
06:04 And that people would be pulled in
06:06 to feel that they're personally connected to the story,
06:08 not just because they're fans of Tupac
06:10 or admirers of what a powerful Black woman Ofeini was,
06:14 but because what they did in their lives,
06:17 their personal lives and their public lives,
06:20 their revolutionary and artistic lives, spoke to everyone.
06:25 And so that's what the journey was like.
06:27 And that's what I think we're proudest of about the way
06:31 the storytelling is.
06:32 The other thing that Alan did so brilliantly
06:36 was that we don't really exist in a straight timeline in life.
06:41 Just like now, we're reliving 50 years ago
06:45 with the rollback of voting rights and the right
06:49 to choose and affirmative action,
06:52 that we're in parallel time zones.
06:55 And I think what Alan discovered in making the film
06:58 is that that was true of their lives,
07:00 that you could move around in time.
07:02 And that's also, I think, what's touching the audience
07:04 in a really powerful way.
07:06 We can go, was that 50 years ago or just yesterday?
07:09 Is that Ofeini and Tupac or me and my son?
07:12 Is that toxic masculinity, something that happened then
07:15 or something I'm seeing in the streets of Chicago and Harlem
07:19 and with our young men and women searching for identity?
07:22 So all of these reasons made it what
07:24 we knew was going to be a painful, intense, but ultimately
07:27 a powerful journey.
07:29 Yeah, even with-- he kept saying a couple of times over,
07:33 they have their foot on our necks.
07:34 And that was something that was such a big conversation
07:37 with George Floyd.
07:38 And it's like, how much have we advanced, really?
07:41 I mean, imagine when you see the scene--
07:43 we watched it with some friends the other day--
07:45 where he's saying in 1992, I think it is, I can't breathe.
07:50 Right?
07:51 Exactly.
07:52 And again, that incident came out of the name Tupac Omaru
07:56 Shakur, right?
07:57 The Peruvian revolutionary leader that I can't breathe.
08:03 So much of it makes it say, this is a timeline that we're
08:07 all living at the same time.
08:10 What was that like for you to lens--
08:13 this is history across the whole docuseries.
08:16 But when we get into the case of Ofeini's case
08:19 and here Jamal's case, I mean, we're
08:21 dealing with something that's historical.
08:24 What was it like for you, Alan, to go back and forth
08:27 between that time to tell this important story?
08:30 It was explosive for me personally,
08:32 because as we all know, the current climate, what
08:35 started happening in 2016 onward,
08:37 I had to go back into therapy about all this stuff.
08:41 Because I just never thought I would see it be like this
08:44 in our lifetime again.
08:45 And I had a lot of anger.
08:46 So to be able to work on something
08:49 where you can channel that anger into something
08:52 creative and inspiring and meaningful,
08:55 and bring about a lot of understanding too,
08:58 especially about a narrative and a story about those Panther
09:04 21 and Ofeini and her journey in that, that was lost
09:10 somewhere in the history.
09:12 No one-- you heard about it, but you don't learn about it.
09:16 And I was a victim of the public school system.
09:19 I never knew anything about this.
09:21 All they taught us is Black Panther was--
09:23 Black Panthers were a kill Whitey organization,
09:26 and nothing could be further from the truth.
09:28 And I learned that on this.
09:29 That's how ignorant I was.
09:32 I learned what an inclusive organization they were,
09:37 and all the good they were doing in their community.
09:40 And you're like, why would someone want to tear this down?
09:43 I mean, what is going on within the government?
09:45 So there's a lot in the journey through Ofeini's family,
09:49 through the Panther veterans such as Jamal,
09:52 who I've become close with and know Jamal.
09:54 He's just not an EP and a subject in the film,
09:57 but have had many talks about all this stuff off camera.
10:02 And it's been an incredibly rewarding journey for me,
10:06 because it all makes sense now.
10:08 And I was naive enough.
10:10 Jamal talks about the voting rights and the right
10:13 to choose and affirmative action.
10:15 I thought, like a lot of naive people,
10:17 we are at the mountaintop with those.
10:20 And a lot of these Panther veterans
10:22 would pull me to the side and go,
10:23 no, this is an internal struggle.
10:25 This is always-- you try to maintain victories.
10:29 And as Ofeini and Tupac said, freedom
10:32 won't come in our lifetime.
10:33 And that's disheartening to know,
10:36 but you have to keep the fight for the next generation.
10:39 But our love of Tupac has never stopped.
10:44 If anything, it's increased.
10:45 And now we got an update very recently
10:47 about the murder investigation.
10:49 Do you guys feel hopeful at all that we could maybe
10:52 find some justice there?
10:54 Hopeful, I think, is there, because you want justice
11:03 and you want resolution.
11:05 But Ofeini always focused on Tupac's legacy.
11:09 Ofeini never obsessed with the investigation in that way,
11:12 did not spend her life.
11:14 As some families might have, just saying,
11:17 I just kind of want to know the truth.
11:20 Somehow this is reminiscent of what
11:24 happened in Malcolm X's case, where we never truly
11:29 kind of understood.
11:30 Or the assassination of Dr. King,
11:33 where there are bigger forces at play.
11:36 The counterintelligence program that
11:37 destroyed the Black Panther Party,
11:39 I believe some version of that was at work in the hip hop
11:44 movement, and then the division of the East Coast and the West
11:47 Coast.
11:48 Tupac and I would have conversations
11:49 about that at that time to learn from those legacies of what
11:54 had happened in the secret wars against organizations
11:57 like the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Panther Party,
12:00 and the American Indian Movement.
12:03 So I think the focus and the concentration
12:05 was to build legacy in that way, and the life
12:08 lessons in that way.
12:09 And for me, I think that's still the concentration.
12:12 If new answers come, that would be great.
12:15 But I think the work now more than ever,
12:17 and I think Dear Mama helps to do that,
12:19 is to learn from those lessons.
12:21 And as Alan said, to understand that whatever we take away
12:24 from it, whatever continue to fight,
12:27 personally means that we all have to continue to fight.
12:30 How about you, Alan?
12:33 I'm hopeful.
12:34 Whether smoke or fire, so I'm hopeful
12:36 that finally the case will be closed and concluded.
12:42 But as Jamal said, and you see the work
12:45 that Afeyni did, because as much a mystery as that is or was,
12:50 it never overshadowed the icon, the legend, the art, the poet,
12:55 the actor, the hip hop artist that Tupac is globally.
12:59 That was never bigger than his work.
13:02 So Afeyni, job well done.
13:05 Job well done.
13:06 Yeah, and also in that she could have just
13:08 hidden away in her grief.
13:09 But she also was like, I'm the mother of a murder victim,
13:13 just like a bunch of other moms are.
13:15 Black moms, moms from everywhere.
13:17 I thought that was very admirable.
13:19 You know, the other thing I'm proudest of about this journey
13:22 and Jamal and I, I had this moment in real time
13:26 with Jamal on a break from his interview
13:29 when it finally made sense his passing to me.
13:31 And what it meant, because I couldn't
13:34 find any meaning in it.
13:36 And Tupac is just a great beacon for all these messages
13:41 and all his mother's original intent and purpose
13:45 and the front lines of the civil rights movement
13:48 to come through globally now.
13:51 That's-- she did a wonderful job.
13:54 And you see her--
13:55 the thing I'm most proudest of in this film
13:58 is this unique Black woman.
13:59 You see her hero's journey.
14:02 You see it right before your eyes when she fell,
14:05 when she stumbled, when she was seemingly lost forever,
14:09 got back up, cleaned herself up, and got focused
14:12 before her son passed.
14:14 And then when her son passes, you
14:16 see her bringing the meaning out that was innately already there
14:21 in that name, in that journey, and in that individual,
14:25 and of course, in herself.
14:28 This is going to be my least favorite part
14:29 because I have to wrap this up.
14:33 But it was so lovely to chat with you, Jamal and Alan.
14:36 I'll be cheering for you at the Emmy Awards.
14:39 And that we finally get some justice in Tupac's murder.
14:45 Senseless, senseless.
14:47 But we get to really learn about these two beautiful people
14:49 in your documentary.
14:50 So thank you so much for chatting with me today.
14:54 Thank you, Rosa.
14:54 It was fantastic.
14:55 And in the words of Tupac, everyone keep your head up.