Phillip Youmans' "Burning Cane" Gives an Intimate Look at Religion in the Deep South

I was struck by how personal Phillip Youmans was when we met for an interview the day before his film, Burning Cane, was screened at the 2019 New Orleans Film Festival. The film centers around Helen Wayne, a Southern religious woman navigating caring for her volatile son, grandson, and preacher that delivers sermons while battling alcoholism.

At the core of Burning Cane is the role of religion in the Black community and how vices can destroy or provide us peace. The making of the film, by nature, is tied to a long lineage of Black creators working with few resources to produce projects that have deep cultural impact.

For the 19-year-old, who is a New Orleans native, Burning Cane developed from a short film script titled “The Glory” that he wrote while attending New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). When he presented the script to Isaac Weeb, his mentor and an instructor at NOCCA, Phillip was encouraged to expand the idea into a feature-length script. While writing the script for Burning Cane, Phillip pulled from his experiences of going to Sunday church services with his mother, an Evangelical Christian, and her childhood stories of growing up in Huspa, South Carolina. His mother allowing him to have his own ideas about religion paved the way for Phillip to explore the subject matter in his work.

“She supports it because she sees that my intention is to humanize [these characters],” Phillip tells Teen Vogue. “You have to be vulnerable with people to make good art.”

Of all the film’s characters, Helen Wayne, played by Karen Kaia Livers (Treme), the matriarch of the Wayne family, is Phillip’s favorite because she is pushed to make critical choices after the men in her life — her son Daniel Wayne (Dominique McClellan) and Reverend Tillman (Wendell Pierce) — misbehave. “She’s the vessel to speak on the dangers of enacting a fundamentalist interpretation of religion,” Phillip says.

The film juxtaposes religious sermons with scenes of Daniel Wayne encouraging his son to drink milk spiked with liquor or Reverend Tillman drunkenly driving home after church. In so many ways, the film honors the beauty and pain that Christianity has imparted onto the Black community.

Burning Cane is not Phillip’s first foray into filmmaking. His video installation, "Won’t You Come Celebrate With Me", which is inspired by the poem of the same title by Lucile Clifton, is about “Black woman in an alternative Afro-future.” His short film, Nairobi, made with Solange Knowles’ creative agency Saint Heron, follows a West African family immigrating to New York City and attempting to make sense of life there. And his 2016 project My Sweet Boy is about a complicated relationship between a father and son.

For the making of Burning Cane, Phillip relied on members of his community heavily: he borrowed camera equipment from a friend, got funding with money earned from his job at a local cafe and donations from family/friends, a NOCCA alumni allowed him to film in Mount Sinai Baptist Church, and finding one of the lead actors, Wendell Pierce, came through via a customer at his cafe job.

“Writing, directing, and bringing [my vision for] cinematography was out of fear that I didn’t want anyone else to possibly break Jacob’s gear,” Phillip says jokingly about his friend’s camera equipment. “With that, it forced me to look at the film to assess the whole thing in a whole different way.”

Burning Cane exists in a time when lots of DIY Black storytelling is entering the mainstream. Issa Rae’s hit HBO show, Insecure, is an offshoot project of her web series, Awkward Black Girl, that she shot with the help of friends and fundraising. Ryan Coogler, acclaimed director of movies like Black Panther and Creed, worked on his first feature-length film, Fruitville Station with help from the family of Oscar Grant, in his home city of Oakland, California. What connects the work of creators like Issa Rae, Ryan Coogler, and Phillip Youmans is how their community ties influence their projects and the ability to work within a budget when starting out one’s career. What separates Phillip from his predecessors is his ability to do so before his freshman year in college at New York University.

The film’s gritty cinematography, soulful soundtrack, and personal roots surely hit a sweet spot at the Tribeca Film Festival. Phillip was the youngest director to have a film in the competition, became the first Black director to win the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, and won for Best Cinematography. Lead actor in the film and co-producer Wendell Pierce also won Best Actor at Tribeca.

When asked what he hopes Burning Cane teaches other young creatives, he says, “For other young creatives, I hope that what I was fortunate to accomplish with Burning Cane provides more fuel for anyone who feels like they can’t see a project to fruition." Adding, "On paper, we rarely had enough money or time to move exactly as planned, but I think we made up for that with passion, positive vibes, and grit. You’ve got to be able to have faith in your friends; they’re sometimes the only people who will really ride for you when resources are slim.”

Burning Cane is set to premiere on Netflix on November 6.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue