The Doll, a twenty-minute dramatic short film, is set in the early 1900s and tells the story of Tom Taylor, the black proprietor of the Wyandot Hotel Barbershop.  Taylor’s humanity, his dignity, and his responsibility to family and community are severely challenged when he realizes that he has an opportunity to avenge an injustice that was inflicted on his father decades earlier.  Emmy award winning independent filmmaker Dante James based the screenplay on a short story by Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932).  

Charles W. Chesnutt, a master storyteller, was born before the end of the Civil War and grew up in North Carolina during the Reconstruction Era.  When he began his writing career, black Americans had been free for only twenty-five years.  In the late 1890’s long before the Harlem Renaissance, before Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Chesnutt became the first African American writer to use the white controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community.  Before Chesnutt stories about the black experience by white writers were often degrading and paternalistic.  Chesnutt began to define black Americans from their own points of view.  His stories reflected the dignity and humanity of black people while also capturing the horror of slavery, racism, and oppression.

A twenty-minute short dramatic film complete with a specially designed educational component.

(Purchase Here)