Through the combination of cinema, interview and contemporary dance, director Jackson Kroopf and choreographer Chris Emile meditate on masculinity and the spaces and communities that inform a boy’s perspective on what it means to be a man. 

“How might our internal selves fight with external expectations of male performance?” say Kroopf and Emile who also stars in Mend. “What conflicts arise between personal intuition and socially enforced norms?”

These questions become part of a physical dialogue that Emile has with the spaces around him. From the dinner table to the barber shop, gym and church, each location represents—as the director duo describe—“universal touchstones of masculinity and race.”

Accentuated by the voice-overs that critique manliness and sexuality in relation to blackness, the film reveals the truth behind the dancer’s two selves. His hidden identity presents itself in unexpected bursts of naked flesh that folds, sweeps and leaps across the spaces that forged him. 

“Male norms can cause harm to the male body,” say Kroopf and Emile, whose choreographic work has been commissioned by musicians Solange Knowles and Moses Sumney. “After seeing the toll this constant fight takes on our dancer, we decided to devote the film’s finale to the process of mending oneself.”