By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

Amarr Coleman grew up in Lexington’s East End, but moved away right after high school to become a successful artist in Chicago. Now he’s back in Lexington to settle the affairs of his recently deceased grandmother, including whether to sell the house where she raised him or to resettle there himself. Deeply conflicted about this decision, Amarr — with the help of an old girlfriend, a photographer with a deep love for the neighborhood — gradually rediscovers the historically black part of town where he grew up.

That’s the premise of “Everything in Its Place,” a 40-minute film inspired by the real-life experiences of residents of Lexington’s First District, the East End in particular. Directed by Maya Brown and produced by Jamari Turner, the Roots & Reels Film Project, as it’s also known, will have its red-carpet world premiere at the Kentucky Theatre on Thursday, August 31.

It will be the fruition of a dream for Turner, who conceived the project last year as a thesis for her master’s degree in community and leadership development at the University of Kentucky. “I was thinking about all the public images of Lexington and how they’ve never aligned with the Black history of Lexington,” she says in a recent interview. “As a history major, I’ve done a lot of oral history, but not everyone is interested in that. I decided that an easier way to get stories out is through film.”

As research for the project — which received grants and other support from LexArts, VisitLEX, the Bluegrass Community Foundation and other organizations — Turner and her team convened a five-week series of guided workshops with First District residents, including a number of artists, to solicit their memories and stories about the area, focusing on the East End neighborhood.

“One participant brought in her wedding ring and told a lot of different stories about dating her now-husband,” Turner says. “As teenagers they would walk around the First District together and pop in and out of places, some of which are still there, some not there. Another participant brought in a photograph of his grandmother taken in her kitchen at Bluegrass-Aspendale, a public housing project that was demolished in the early 2000s. He remembered waking up to the smell of bacon and eggs cooking, and also other things that people in the neighborhood used to cook when they would come together.”

The creative team, including Brown, writer Ellis Bryson and poet LeTonia Jones, then set about writing a fictional script incorporating themes, characters and even direct quotes from the workshops. (Some items brought into the workshops by participants, including a wedding ring and a locket, ended up in the film.) Darker themes such as grief, poverty, instability, gentrification and lack of infrastructure and investment in the neighborhood are touched upon, lightly, but the film is much more interested in celebrating the positive qualities of the East End, with an emphasis on home ownership.

“We wanted it to be a love story, in part because there aren’t many love stories about Black folks, and we ended up with a love story that has a bit of suspense — there’s a twist,” Jones says. “It also picks up on things related to legacy: what it means to be a Black homeowner and whether or not we want to take it on as another generation of Black people who might want to leave the area. So, it’s a coming-home story — reckoning with what it might mean to come home and reckoning with what it might look like to walk away. It’s also about how the community itself offers up some wisdom along the way. It’s a beautiful illustration of community and the influence it can have.”

Filming began in December and wrapped in March, with actors Manny Thurman as Amarr and Martina Barksdale as the old flame who helps guide him back toward an appreciation of the East End. (Other prominent Black Lexingtonians, including Chester Grundy and Claudia Love Mair, also show up in smaller roles, and some of the workshop participants have cameos.) Brown and cinematographer Remy Bawili shot the film in and around the handsome and historic Third Street home of retired journalist and East End activist Thomas Tolliver. “I’m incredibly happy to see young people interested in preserving our history and telling our stories,” he says. “The film is important for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it captures a Black neighborhood as it exists in 2025.”

“It was fun but hard,” says Brown, a KET reporter and the daughter of Councilman-at-Large James Brown, who once represented the First District. “I’m from the First District, but a lot of the stories I heard as part of this process, I never heard before. I just wanted to do right by the film.” Thurman agrees. “It was a lot of people’s first time doing a film, so there was a learning curve for everyone, including myself. But I had fun, and I think it’s important for everyone to see the film because it celebrates a part of Lexington that is not often spoken of or is viewed in very negative light. People need to see that there’s a lot of great things about the East End.”

Tywanna White, who grew up in the neighborhood and worked on the film’s set and production design, recalls the filming process as daunting, at least initially, but ultimately rewarding. “At first it didn’t seem real, and I thought, ‘We’re never going to pull this off.’ But we stuck with it, worked all hours of the night, and we got it done. Then when we got to see a rough cut of the film, I was blown away to realize that this is the community I grew up in, parts of which are no longer there — and there’s a movie about it!”

When Jones saw the rough cut, “I was just so proud,” she says. “I was so proud of Maya and Jamari and Tywanna — these Black young’uns who are so talented. It gave me so much energy to trust that it’s going to be okay, that these stories will be told, that it will be powerful, and that the community’s voice does matter.”

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Thursday’s film premiere at the Kentucky, 7-10 p.m., is free, but reservations are suggested at kentuckytheatre.org. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring members of the cast and crew moderated by Kiah Arnold of RadioLex.

“For me, what’s really important is that art is a vehicle for imagining more self-determined futures that aren’t coming out of someone else’s imagination,” Turner says. “My hope is that there will be more films made about the community by community members, guided by their own hands, because we have stories that are worth telling.”

In fact, another locally produced film will debut at the Lyric Theater in late August. The local non-profit Black Yarn will present “Lexington: Resilience in the Redline.” According to the Black Yarn website, the documentary “focuses on the history and present impact of residential segregation on Black land and wealth in Lexington, KY and the potential pathways to a more just future in our community.” A panel discussion, moderated by Tom Martin, editor and host of the WEKU program Eastern Standard, will precede the screening. Panelists include local Realtor and mayoral candidate Raquel Carter; Nikki Lanier, CEO of Harper Slade and the RAARE Woman Collective; and a representative from The National Association of Realtors’ Fair Housing Policy & Grants Division. Black Yarn’s Kristen LaRue and Regina Lewis will provide details during the August 14 edition of Eastern Standard.

(Images provided except where noted.)