West Chester’s Fr3deR1cK Taylor Takes Movie Making To New Heights
by Melissa Jacobs
Fr3deR1cK Taylor is the filmmaker America needs right now. His new “Pre-Existing Freedom” is equal parts art, documentary and social commentary, all of it powerfully, petitely packed into a 15-ish minute short film. The title of “Pre-Existing Freedom” is a mash-up of “pre-existing conditions” and “freedom,” two issues that had a head-on collision in 2020, the year in which the film takes place.
While much has been filmed, written and said about COVID-y, chaotic 2020, no one has created anything as beautiful, haunting, thought provoking and supremely watchable as “Pre-Existing Freedom.”
Filmed in and around Fr3deR1cK’s apartment in Atlanta during 2020, “Pre-Existing Freedom” makes clear connections between the social isolation of COVID quarantines and the social isolation of being a Black man in America. The film chronicles Fr3deR1cK’s real-time confusion, loneliness and frustration with the twin pandemics of COVID and institutional racism.
While the subject matters are heavy, the film is beautiful and gorgeously shot in black and white which, Fr3deR1cK says, is more of an aesthetic choice than a political statement. “The world had become black and white. We saw things in black and white,” he said. “You believed in the pandemic or you didn’t believe in the pandemic. You believed in equality and justice for all or you did not care. It was about extremes. Black and white is very stark. It is very binary. I wanted to emphasize that.”
And yet, “Pre-Existing Freedom” is not lecture-like, nor is it laced with lefty-liberal leanings. On the contrary, the film has brisk pacing and is wonderfully edited. It won Best Arts/Experimental Film at the 2024 West Chester Film Festival, which was an honor and a homecoming for Fr3deR1cK.
Fr3deR1cK Taylor started his career the same way that many famous filmmakers have: with a Super 8 camera. He grew up in West Chester, attending Henderson High School while his father taught at Cheyney University and his mother worked at the Chester County Health Department. West Chester has changed a lot since he grew up there. “It’s emerging and going to be something incredible and wonderful,” he said of West Chester’s developing diversity and cultural opportunities.
Meanwhile, “Pre-Existing Freedom” is only the first of Fr3deR1cK’s planned trilogy. The second and third – “Where Is America The Beautiful?” and “Hope and Story” – “unpack the social discourse post-2020,” he explains. Those films, web series and other works are created by Tomorrow Pictures, Fr3deR1cK’s production company. They merge news with history, providing fact-based documentaries with compelling storytelling to create must-watch films about thorny subjects in America and elsewhere. These “newer platforms for how to tell real stories are essentially important.”
For more information about Fr3deR1cK Taylor’s work, head to the Tomorrow Pictures website or fr3der1ck.com. Big thanks to the West Chester Film Festival!
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