Rachael Abigail Holder is a writer and filmmaker from New York. A first-generation Guyanese-American, she has a playwriting MFA from NYU Tisch and directed television shows and shorts before making her feature debut with Love, Brooklyn, starring André Holland, Nicole Beharie and DeWanda Wise as three Brooklynnites navigate love, careers and friendship in a changing borough. In the piece below, she talks about finding a common creative language with the film’s cinematographer, Martim Vian.—M.M.
Love, Brooklyn, is a testament to the idea that the most beautiful things are created when you let go of your idea of perfection and embrace the messy, human reality of making something with someone you believe in.
Making my first feature film, Love, Brooklyn, was an exercise in trust and a crash course in communication. I wanted to create a movie with a calm, inviting rhythm — a deliberate counterpoint to the relentless tension so often found on screen.
The moment I met my Director of Photography, Martim Vian, I knew we were kindred spirits—we were fast friends. We shared a passion for honest storytelling, and both wanted to create a film about Black people that felt familiar and also unlike anything made before.
There was just one fundamental problem we ran into during our initial pre-production: we spoke completely different creative languages.
I’m the kind of director who draws my shot lists. My notebooks are filled with sketched characters in frames. I speak in poetic metaphors, describing a scene as feeling like a “step on an exposed nail that sits in a pool of honey.”
Martim, on the other hand, is a lighting genius who works from a place of artistic, technical talk. His language is one of lumens and color temperatures.
To complicate matters, I was making a film with mostly Black characters, and he was a white man who hadn’t shot a film like this before. The challenge wasn’t just about bridging a communication gap; it was about finding a shared visual language that could honor a lived experience that wasn’t his own.
Our miscommunications happened in the pre-production phase. I’d point to an example of coloring and lighting that I wanted to avoid and say, “I do not want them to look muddy or lost in darkness, but I still very much want to see the darkness of their skin.” Martim would nod patiently and ask about soft keys and I’d only think of music.
We were both trying, but our words felt like they would bounce off a wall. The initial spark of our creative connection was now being tested by the high-stakes pressure of an impending shoot. It was in those moments that I learned a vital, practical lesson for any filmmaker: your ego is a luxury you cannot afford.
How a Break in Love, Brooklyn Led to a Breakthrough for Rachael Abigail Holder
The solution came not from one single, grand idea, but from an unexpected shutdown. Nicole Beharie was my first pick to play one of the lead roles. She was a huge get and had a schedule change with her Apple series, The Morning Show, that inevitably also changed our production schedule.
It was more than worth it — she is who we wanted for the part. With filming on hold, the pressure was off. Martim and I stopped trying to translate each other’s words directly and just talked. I made several decks with picture references of what I wanted the warmth and feel to look like, and Martim responded in kind, with his own decks, to see if he understood.
It was in that pause that we committed to a visual language that had a set of strict rules to create my vision. One of them being a refusal to intrude on the characters’ space; we were observing, not invading. I also wanted to see Brooklyn in every shot and not rely on anamorphic filming or cutaways to the city to have it be a character in our story. By the time we were ready to prep the movie again, we were perfectly in sync, and our on-set collaboration was seamless.
The results were transformative. The camera became a participant in the city, always keeping Brooklyn visible, allowing the surroundings to feel like a co-star rather than a backdrop. Together, we didn’t just light our movie’s spaces; we imbued them with a gentle warmth that feels like a memory, creating a visual language of its own that makes a modern-day story feel both intimately familiar and freshly seen.
In the end, our collaboration was a microcosm of the film itself. We didn’t just make a movie; we built a bridge. We created a unique visual language from two different creative dialects and found that when you get past the technical talk and the metaphors, what truly matters is trust.
Love, Brooklyn, is a testament to the idea that some stories are not about Herculean journeys, but about the profound weight of everyday existence. It is a work that asserts that softness isn’t slight, and that art can be a defiant act of healing.
Love, Brooklyn is now in theaters, from Greenwich Entertainment.
Main image: Andre Holland and Nicole Beharie in Love, Brooklyn. Greenwich Entertainment.