From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. One of the great things about film independent

as an organization is they have the Independent Spirit Awards. One of the categories for the Independent Spirit Awards, organization is that they have the Independent Spirit Awards.

And one of the categories for the Independent Spirit Awards, this is John Cassavetti's Award,

which is a category for films made for $500,000 or less.

My guest, Aman Abasi, was a nominee this year for his film, Davian.

First of all, good to have you here.

Thank you so much.

And if you will do me the favor of telling the audience about your movie, which is now on Netflix.

Yeah, so the movie Davian follows a young boy named Davian, and we shot this movie outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, and he just lost his older brother to gang violence. Because of that, he's really looking for a place to find comfort and support and a community, and a local gang presents itself to him,

and there he gets initiated, and we see the journey that he goes on. And to me, it's really

not a story, not a gang story, but more so a story about a

community and finding a community for a young child. And a boy who's really looking to find

another family, because he has a family he's with, he stays with a sister and her man and their

little boy. And what we see him basically, almost measuring himself against every grown-up male he comes in contact with, don't we?

That's exactly right.

There's this aspect of masculinity throughout the whole film.

You know, we start on the frame of a portrait of his brother in Memorium, but then we pan over to Davian as he's doing bench pressing.

He's like doing this sort of macho exercise and talking to himself really like talking to himself up yeah he's talking to himself up but

that's exactly right masculinity is this sort of central aspect to devian's identity and trying to find

that and he's sort of reconciling his youth with adulthood. So as he

comes across characters who are in his family life or in his gang life, he's finding a way to

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