The outsider has long appeal in art. Often it’s because he or she is a curio meant to contrast convention. That’s fine with filmmaker Rodney Evans, but it isn’t quite enough.

“Growth happens when you’re engaged with otherness, and I think there’s something beautiful about that struggle.”

Evans’s last film, Brother to Brother, took the Harlem Renaissance — a sacred cow of black history — and revealed its gay legacy. Weaving journalism with dramatic invention, the film was a provocative hybrid designed to challenge historic assumptions and expose the prejudices which inform them. Chiefly: what is invisible in African-American history, what makes up its ideas of masculinity and the white perception of them; and is the curse and gift of minority art its ability to induce personal growth in the majority?

Such notions were met with resistance. At one screening, Evans recounts how the primarily African-American audience shouted sexual epithets at the screen when they learned the protagonist was gay. But the filmmaker looks on that moment as memorable, particularly as the catcalls were silenced by the end. “I see the film as an antidote to a lot of ideas in black, youth culture, hip-hop culture, and to those codes that people see as giving them power.”

“I think we’re living in a time where there’s more fear, more paranoia in the world. There are huge obstacles to extending yourself, and it’s so much easier not to care, not to connect. But there’s something about being an outsider that forces people to look at the inside.” And in inviting them there reveals how important it could be to stay.

Rodney Evans is the recipient of the Independent Feature Project's Gordon Parks Award for Screenwriting for his most recent film, Brother to Brother. The film won the Special Jury Prize in Drama at Sundance 2004 and was released theatrically in major cities across the country in late 2004/early 2005.