Boots Riley’s brilliance shines through in the sensational and thought-provoking series, “I’m a Virgo.” At the heart of the story is the extraordinary, 13-foot-tall Cootie, portrayed with perfection by Jharrel Jerome, renowned for his Emmy-winning performance in “When They See Us.”
TAYARISHA POE: I made an overture to “Selah and the Spades,” called “Overture,” in 2014, knowing I eventually wanted to make a feature. But I didn’t know how to write a feature script, and I didn’t know what it would be about, so I wrote short stories about the characters and their world — one every day for the month of November 2014. At the end of the month, I had all these stories. Since I knew how to write and take photos, I turned the stories into separate multimedia works. It’s not the most conventional approach to making a movie but it worked for the story because I wound up spending so much time world-building and thinking about the lives of these kids, which in the end made the feature itself so much more complex and rich.
Writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s “Selah and the Spades,” currently playing on
Amazon Prime—immerses us in the world of Selah (“Sell-uh” ) Summers
(Lovie Simone), the shrewd and charming senior head of the Spades and one
of five underground factions that absolutely dominate social life at a
prestigious boarding school.
“When They See Us” wins four AAFCA TV Honors, including Best Limited Series, Best Writing, Breakthrough Performance & Best Ensemble