Director's Works
Mick Jenkins, Smoke Break Dance Andre Muir
Writer and director Andre Muir is the son of Jamaican immigrants, born in Chicago, and now based in Brooklyn, NY. He crafts stories from the ground up with an emotional honesty and layered aesthetic expression, employing an observational, visual language that becomes increasingly participatory as his films unfold. He skillfully builds worlds unfolding with nuance and subtext, regardless of genre. Muir has quickly emerged as a go-to filmmaker and music video collaborator for some of the industry’s most original musicians.
In my work, I make a deliberate effort to focus on the Black experience, and that was my intention with this video as well. I aimed to zero in on black toxic masculinity specifically. However, witnessing the public lynching of Jordan Neely, seeing how no one helped him but instead they’d rather record it on their phones, it made me realize that we all suffer from a larger culprit: patriarchy in general. This realization led to a last minute inclusion of an additional scene at the end of the video, highlighting this broader perspective. As these people egged this man on, as he sucked the life out of Jordan, I’m sure he was aware of these cameras, I’m sure he thought he was a hero, as he did what he was “trained” to do, I’m sure he thought he was doing what a man would do in that situation.”
