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Hi, I\u2019m Malcolm Washington, the co-writer and director of \u201cThe Piano Lesson.\u201d So this scene here is the climax of the film. So all spoilers ahead. In the film, Berniece, played by Danielle Deadwyler, she has a complicated relationship with the piano and has been afraid to play it because, in her words, she doesn\u2019t want to wake the spirits up that the piano conjures. Her brother, Boy Willie, who\u2019s been trying to sell the piano the whole movie, is having a fight to the death with a ghost upstairs as he has to confront a kind of spiritual reckoning happening within himself. So this moment, Danielle\u2019s Berniece decides that she must confront this thing and lay hands and play the piano for the first time. This was a sequence that we spent a lot of time talking about in shooting it and then the cutting process. We have all of our themes converge here. The idea of shadow and light, of truth and secrets, and confronting the deepest parts of ourself to get through. And transcend. Call on \u2018em, Berniece, call on \u2018em. I love what Danielle does here. She just goes somewhere else, really. And I think if you talk to her now about this sequence, she wouldn\u2019t even remember shooting it. This here. We wanted to tell a story of Black spiritual practice in America. So, in our spiritual practice, there\u2019s these two different traditions, the Black Southern Christian tradition and roots from West African spiritual practice. And we engage with both of them here in acknowledging the iconography of some West African spiritual practice in Berniece\u2019s white dress. The idea that you can call on your ancestors and that there\u2019s a boundaryless relationship between the living and the dead. So here she\u2019s conjuring the spirits of her ancestors, chanting their names. \u201cI want you to help me, I want you to help me, I want you to help me Mama Berniece, I want you to help me.\u201d Declaring their identities and finding power in it. So as this scene builds, you\u2019ll see the cutting rhythm intensifies, the lighting intensifies as she conjures these spirits in an attempt to exorcise this ghost. Avery is there representing our Christian spiritual practice as well. And he opens the portal to all of this. At this moment in the sound, you\u2019ll start to hear the rumble of the house, the drums of Africa come in, followed by a choir voices representing our ancestors and the beauty that they carry with them. This whole film, there\u2019s been a haunting around and the haunting was scary at points. But here we see that it\u2019s powerful in beauty. I always like this image here because it\u2019s a family portrait of sorts. I was looking at, there\u2019s a Japanese photographer called Masahisa Fukase, and he did this family portrait series that really inspired the frames here of the family. And when they come in, she\u2019s able to finally exorcise this ghost and clear the trauma of this family past as they all lay hands on her and the flame ignites. Peace is restored. The famiy\u2019s connected to each other and to the ancestors before them. And there\u2019s beauty there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n