00:00well hello everyone thank you all so much as I'm standing before you all right
00:11now I am filled with I'm filled with so much emotion it's bringing me back to
00:16when I was 10 and I moved to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago with my
00:21parents Trinidad stand up okay but I remember when I first got off of the
00:29airplane I was I was feeling nervous and excited and I remember telling my mom
00:36they're blasting this air condition really high but it turned out this is
00:40what you called winter time and I just stood there in awe and I felt lost and
00:48confused as well and even though I'm no longer a little girl I'm standing
00:52before you now as a young woman there are a lot of moments in my life where I still
00:56feel real lost and confused and excited but right now I feel incredibly incredibly
01:03grateful first and foremost to God the Almighty Most High King for giving me
01:10this opportunity but more importantly for filling me with the audacity to believe
01:16that I could tell a story okay because let me tell y'all before I wrote this film
01:23I had never written a screenplay in my life but I went to the Brooklyn Public
01:29Library every day for weeks on end and taught myself how to tell a story
01:37because I believed that I could do it in addition to being thankful to God I'm
01:46thankful to my mom and dad who are in the audience right now because as an artist I
01:54have a lot of goals and many of them are unrealistic however I'm discovering that
01:59not just because I don't believe it doesn't mean it wouldn't happen because
02:03here I am standing before y'all today right but my parents they never discouraged my
02:08dreams even though we were immigrants and as this is not necessarily the path one
02:12takes they never told me no so thank you mom and dad and lastly I'm deeply
02:18appreciative to essence and to the judges for creating a platform of visibility
02:26because I think a lot of us in this audience know the importance of
02:30visibility especially during a time in a society in a world in an industry that's
02:34telling us that we're invisible but I think the mere fact that we are in this
02:39room is because we stand on the shoulders of ancestors who were resilient and as a
02:45result come on ancestors come through
02:53and the mere fact that we're in this room is a testament to the fact that we
02:59will not only continue to tell our stories we will continue to celebrate our
03:04stories because it is a privilege to be a storyteller it's a blessing to be an
03:09artist and as I stand before you right now it is an honor to be a black woman in Hollywood
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