Inside the Radical Release Strategy for Sundance Winner ‘Ricky’

“Sometimes you have to be brave about it,” Sheryl Lee Ralph saying. The Emmy winner was one of the first to log a Zoom conversation about her new film Rickyand before everyone else arrives, their film’s journey of defying expectations is well summed up.

From first-time feature director Rashad Frett with a producing team including Sterling Brim, also making his feature film debut, Ricky premiered 16 months ago on Sundance to wide acclaim and won the festival’s competition directing prize. The drama, which intricately focuses on a 30-year-old man reintegrating into society after being incarcerated since his teenage years, features strong performances from Ralph and If Beale Street Could Talk alum Stephen James. But with a challenge and change indie film scene, the distributors did not bite as expected – and the opportunity to be creative presented itself.

Brave, indeed.

With the facilitation of Blue Harbor Entertainment, Ricky is self-distributed, with the filmmakers still holding the rights as they prepare for an April 24 theatrical release. A Kickstarter campaign also helped drive its focused focus. “We want to make sure that people who are actually affected by recidivism and the incarceration system see this film,” Brim said. “I want to make sure that people in Chicago, people in Detroit and any big cities that you think of that have Black and brown people and marginalized groups can see this film.”

Frett said he “grew up around” the Rickyabsorbed many narratives and situations depicted in the film from his childhood. He focused on documentaries before making an initial short of the same name. The film is marked by its verisimilitude: Frett maintains a tight focus on the realities of life after incarceration, the script sometimes hits painfully realistic beats while the filmmaking embraces the chaos of life as it unfolds.

“I wanted to make this film as visceral and as real as possible, so I told my cinematographer, ‘Find the shots, find the frame,'” says Frett. “We were on the headset and I was always in his ear: ‘Just follow the movement.'”

James, who plays the eponymous role, added, “It feels like a film made with a purpose, with a purpose. Every frame of that film is calculated… You are dealing with a 15-year-old boy who begins to mature for the first time (at 30). He spends a lot of time with teenagers to observe the way they act and process the world. “I had to enter the psychology of a 15-year-old boy,” he said. This is the essence where we meet Ricky regardless of his literal age: “I’m really proud of understanding the whole picture.”

Ralph portrays Ricky’s parole officer Joanne, and is drawn to working with James as well as the story itself. “We don’t see a lot of stories about successful young Black men, marginalized young men coming out and having the life they dream of,” he said. “This script speaks very well about a lot of things that these young men face from the system, and how they got into the system to begin with.”

The film’s success at Sundance did not generate much commercial interest – a bigger issue for last year’s competition among American narrative segments, most of which took about a year to find distribution. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize Atropia (received in October, 10 months after the festival.) “We navigated it as much as possible with this type of film,” says Frett.

“We’re trying to be creative in changing this industry and finding new ways to get quality independent films out there — and as a young producer, you don’t want to watch anything you can die from,” Brim added. “For these people involved, I just know that we have to make sure that it survives and that it lives among the people it needs to live in.”

So that’s exactly what it is Ricky The filmmakers began to work. Various screenings took place last year aimed at direct community engagement. Ralph attended one at the men’s prison San Quentin Rehabilitation Center that included a Q&A, and remains deeply moved by its memory.

“We’re in a room with guys who look a lot like the character in the movie — some of them are old, but they’re still that character; some of them are that character at that moment,” Ralph said. “There were times when the movie was playing, you could hear a pin drop…. Their response was, ‘Whoa.’ And there are moments in the film where they start talking back to the film…. It’s a chance to be a person with other people trying to figure out what the next step is, even if they’re in their 20s and won’t be out for another 50 years. I have never experienced anything like that.”

“People are going to watch this film and say, ‘Wow, I see myself in a way I’ve never seen myself before,’” James said. “‘People look at me, I am seen.’ That’s really the biggest testament to being able to make a film like this. ”

There was a learning curve while the theatrical launch for this group of artists, all embarking on this type of independent release for the first time. Frett taught directing at Brooklyn College and claimed even the promotional aspects of Ricky quite scary. Brim entered Ricky following his longtime stint as cohost of the comedy clip show Funnyand with his fellow producers did not take the easy – or safe – rollout path. But no one involved seemed to hesitate about the choice, no matter how new it felt. In their eyes, this was the right, even obvious move; they hardly feel the need to explain it.

Leave it to Ralph, though, to do that.

“The offers don’t come – or they come late, or they come slowly – and people don’t know if they want to talk about this topic. That always happens when it’s an independent film that has something to say about people who are often marginalized – whether they’re in prison, outside of prison – just because of who and what they are,” said Ralph. “So it’s brave to say, ‘You know what? If you don’t open the door for me here, I’ve thought enough about the work I’ve done to come out and say we’re going to do it ourselves. We’re doing this thing ourselves because we refuse to let you see it.’