LET THE MYTH BE
Clutching my phone to my ear, tears stream down my face as I sit behind the wheel of a parked car. Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? My best friend calms me down over the phone. I tell her the facts of what happened. “It’s not conservative,” a white family member said, describing my formal blue African-print dress. I challenged her, but my family member told me I intimidated her, screamed and towered over her. My voice may be louder than most, but I didn’t scream. I may be 5’10”, but I happened to be standing, and she happened to be sitting. My sentences were twisted and thrown back at me until I had become the villain. It was my fault for bringing up race, my words that were hurtful. And above all––I was being unreasonable. No, I was downright wrong.
This paranoia between truth and distruth plagues me as a Black woman. I am simultaneously compelled to point out injustice when I see it, but am often injured by white supremacy in the process. I’m left questioning myself. Am I out of line? I seek to create a film that explores that paranoia. As my heroine swears she sees a monster in the shadows, her world will invalidate her. Her friend will hear her, but her words will go in one ear and out the other. It doesn’t matter that she’s an expert in folklore and mythology––she knows what she’s seeing––her world will call her crazy. And the more she hears that accusation, the more she begins to believe it herself.
LET THE MYTH BE asks: how do you hold onto your truth, when the rest of the world invalidates it? Do you believe yourself or do you let the monster of white supremacy consume you? By making this short, I assert that the monster in the shadows exists. And if we listen to our gut and trust ourselves, we may have a shot at destroying it.
Director. Carrington Walsh
is a genre writer-director originally from Los Angeles, CA, but has lived all over from Europe to North America. As a Black-American-Canadian who was once a competitive cheerleader turned hockey player, Carrington is used to defying expectations. Influenced by her experiences as the golden child at her high school, the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Democratic Party, and a Harvard graduate, most of her villains are institutions. She thrives within institutional structures, but has reckoned with complex emotions upon realizing that the same establishments that have championed her have harmed others. Recipient of the Trevis Ballard Just Keep Swimming Foundation Artist Grant and winner of Roadmap Writers’ Diversity Fellowship, she was also selected for Reelworld’s Emerging 20 Program and a finalist in Harvardwood’s TV Writer’s Competition. Her directorial debut short film LET THE MYTH BE premiered at the Micheaux Film Festival in Los Angeles and screened at Another Hole in the Head. Whether through crime thrillers or grounded sci-fi/fantasy mysteries, Carrington loves asking questions of multifaceted identities, much like the ones she’s unpacked herself.