We Grown Now (2024)
Director: Minhal Baig Run Time: 93 min. Release Year: 2024
Starring: Avery Holliday, Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, Ora Jones, S. Epatha Merkerson
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
Winner of the Changemaker Award at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival.
In 1992 Chicago, as Michael Jordan solidifies himself as a champion, a story of two young legends in their own right begins, As wide-eyed and imaginative best friends Malik and Eric traverse the city, looking to escape the mundanity of school and the hardships of growing up in public housing, their unbreakable bond is challenged when tragedy shakes their community just as they are learning to fly.
“It’s a resolutely poetic, at times even golden-hued portrait of lives unafraid to hope amid growing despair.”
—Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
About the filmmaker:
Minhal Baig is an American writer, director, and producer from Chicago, Illinois. Her film Hala (2019), about a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager uncovering a secret about her family, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Apple. She had a two-year writing-producing deal in television with Amazon, is a 2022 Sundance Momentum Fellow and participated in the 2022 WGA Showrunner Training Program. Baig also served as a story editor on Bojack Horseman (2014-2020) in 2019, and was a staff writer on Peabody-award winning half-hour comedy show Ramy (2019-)
Her latest feature, We Grown Now (2024), about two boys growing up in a Cabrini-Green high rise when a tragedy irrevocably changes their lives, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, awarded the TIFF Changemaker Award and Audience Award at Chicago International Film Festival and received Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Editing nominations for the 2024 Independent Spirit Awards.
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