Family isn’t just a mother, a father, and whatever kids they decide to have. Family is built in many ways. Family is chosen. And family can be whatever it is we decide is it. That is, ultimately, the message of August & Ebony, a short about an unconventional family that goes through its growing pains before finding common ground in the one thing that matters – the common love they have for the new member they’re bringing into the world, together.
The queer community is, in general, much better at the idea of found families and that is because it’s had to be. But August & Ebony is still very good at normalizing a situation that feels strange even for characters who should just go with the flow. Because the thing is, we still exist within the constructs of a society that has told us, for so long, that there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. A right way to be a family and a wrong way to be a family.
A right way to love and a wrong way to love.
We are trying to break out of that. To be better, to know better, and to act better. But sometimes, even without meaning to, we fall into old dynamics. We repeat old mistakes. Written by A. Cooper and directed by Sunyin Zhang, August & Ebony doesn’t have an answer to all the questions, but it aims to ask some of them in a situation that is both complicated and not as complicated as the people involved are making it seem.
More people to love a baby isn’t a bad thing. More people to care for it? When the terrible twos hit, everyone will be happy about that. It all feels too big at the moment. Things always do. But in the end, it’s simple. It’s family. It’s love.
August & Ebony is also, in many ways, a short about the Black experience, and the intricacies of race and sexuality in a community that has barely been able to grapple with one thing, much less with the way those two intersect. That the short manages to be all of these things and yet arrive firmly at a place of mostly being a story about three people who are, above all things, a team – no, a family – not because they have to, but because they decided to be, is a pretty solid achievement.
August & Ebony premiered at the Hollyshorts Film Festival.
