Skepta on Making His First Foray Into Film With Short ‘Tribal Mark’ and Plans for a Feature-Length Movie: ‘I’m Shouting Out to Denzel’

variety.com:

Ellise Shafer For British rapper Skepta, music was just the beginning of his creative pursuits. Earlier this year, the multi-hyphenate released his first short film, “Tribal Mark,” in the U.K., followed by a SXSW screening and premieres in L.A.

and New York last month. The short follows Mark (Jude Carmichael), a teenaged Nigerian immigrant who is adapting to life in London when he is introduced to the world of the undercover Black Secret Service.

Skepta appears in the film as an older Mark, once he has taken up his anti-hero alias of Tribal Mark. Skepta co-directed the short with Dwight Okechukwu, his partner in production company 1Plus1, and hopes that it will draw attention to important social issues surrounding non-EU immigrants, including mental health and racial prejudice. “Being the child of immigrants, when I come across other children of immigrants from around the world, I relate to them a lot.

And I see how they struggle to communicate certain things, or how the trauma’s eating away at them, you know?” Skepta tells Variety. “So I just feel like this film is a nice bit of therapy for people who think or feel like me.” Fresh off of his Coachella performances, Skepta talked with Variety about how “Tribal Mark” came to be, working with a cast and crew made up of 90% ethnic minorities and plans for a feature-length film. How did the idea for “Tribal Mark” come to be? I was thinking about the trauma of immigrants and ultimately mastering the disassociation of the mind and becoming a superhero, a super intelligent being, and how I’d want to put that into a movie.