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

Welcome to The Treatment.

From my house, I'm Elvis Mitchell.

My guest, writer-director, Stella McGee, in a handful of films as a writer-director,

uh, Gene of the Jones is The Weekend and her newest, The Photograph, which is now on Home

Video after a successful theatrical release, has made films, I think, are really interesting because

they're kind of about tradition and the traditions of storytelling in the black

community and how these are kept alive in their way that there's a foot in the past and a foot in the

present and all these films and that's very much the case with the photograph first of all stella

thank you so much for doing the show thank you for having me on if you can talk about that a little

bit because i mean there is a foot for all these protagonists you write, and in the case of the photograph there too, these people who are sort of very much a part of their families, but also very much a part of the world outside of their families.

And it's a really interesting thing to see brought to the screen in the black community for

me.

Yeah, I feel like my thesis has always kind of been since my first film about kind of looking

into, I mean, generations of their family.

You know, I grew up very close to my mom and my grandmother and knew my great-grandmother.

And, you know, they immigrated from Jamaica. So I'm always, I guess, trying to figure out how their lives have affected mine.

But also that thing, well, there's kind of a constant comment by the past, the previous generation

on the lives of people of the younger protagonists.

There's very much happening here with both the characters played by Lakeith and Issa and

their families talking to them about the mistakes they're making in real time.

Yeah, I mean, I think with the photograph, it was, I mean, it had the biggest world to it and the most characters, and even on the side of Lakeith's family with, you know, Tiona and Rell featured as his family, you know, they're just that sounding board of like who he is and the mistakes he's made and kind of like a running scorecard for people watching to figure out like where, you know, where his character is in life in terms of, you know, love and career.

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