‘Ricky’ Filmmaker Rashad Frett on Developing His First Feature Through 3 Sundance Labs and the Best Advice Spike Lee Gave Him

variety.com:

Angelique Jackson Filmmaker Rashad Frett is making movies with a mission. “I’m here to make films that bring in humanity,” Frett tells Variety. “Everything I do, I want to not only entertain our audience but inform them on what’s going on.

Give them food for thought. To bring the audience a visceral perspective from a situation they’ve never experienced before.” Case in point is Frett’s debut feature “Ricky,” about a 30-year-old navigating the challenges of life after being incarcerated for 15 years, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday to rave reviews, including Variety’s.

Anchored by a captivating lead performance by Stephan James (“If Beale Street Could Talk”), the film aims to bring that humanity to the hot-button issue of recidivism and spotlights the support ex-offenders need to avoid being re-incarcerated. “’Ricky’ came from seeing a lot of family members go through the criminal justice system and how they struggled to improve and find work, and some resorted to their old ways,” Frett says, explaining the backstory for the project, which he co-wrote, produced and directed. “We wanted to shed light on this topic with this different type of coming-of-age story, where a 30-year-old adult is outside in the free world for the first time.” Frett developed the project as a short film while attending the NYU Tisch graduate film program, then he and co-writer Lin Que Ayoung got into the Sundance Institute’s writers lab to develop the feature version.