Arts & Entertainment

Tisch Grad: I Want to Uplift People

By Sarah Beckford
Spectrum staff

The main character of Kyleel Rolle’s debut film, PRÆY, gets shot, gets forced to rob a store, gets into a car crash and leaps from a mountaintop to chase a female vision who represents goodness.

The film, which has been screened at several film festivals and will be officially released in August, is something of a fantasy. But it has some real-life parallels.

Twenty-one-year-old Rolle, aka “Proda,” a 2017 graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, should know. He spent part of his growing up years in such an awful part of Newark, N.J., that he’d rather not give the details of what he saw and experienced.

“I don’t really like talking about the negative stuff. But it’s still a huge part of my art, the story I’m telling,” he said.

He does incorporate bits of his own biography into his art, which, in addition to filmmaking, includes recording and performing rap, DJ’ing and producing music of other singers and rappers.

PRÆY, his first film, was screened at Blackstar Film Festival, Southampton Film Festival and other festivals. Besides challenging what he says are often negative depictions of black men in the media, his aim with the film was to show that “there’s other ways of living,” he said.

Some media “project this image of what the archetypal black man is supposed to be like, how he’s supposed to live, how he’s supposed to die.”

Through PRÆY, Rolle is trying to change the conversation about black men, who they are and what they can achieve.

Brandon Collins, whose stage name is Infinitee, is one of Rolle’s closest friends and a rapper in Highclass Hoodlums, which Rolle produces and performs with.

“He’s a lyrical mastermind,” Collins, 21, said of Rolle.

They have known each since pre-school. “I started from the muck, raw and gritty, but we bringing it up,” Collins said, referring as much to his childhood beginnings and Rolle’s as to their common goals as artists.

Through their artistry, both want to help shape and re-shape the culture.

“ … When I spit something,” Rolle said, “when I write something, when I create a piece of art, it’s for it to really manifest and grow into more life.”

By that, he means he wants to improve his followers’ sense of self-worth and inspire them to do good in the world.

“The music that I make, I want it to uplift people. I want it to move their bodies but also their minds. I want to challenge perception in my music,” Rolle said. “ … I want to take this thing we call culture and give the world my perspective.”