“No one can tell you not to create. You must create,” Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo told a crowd of Arkansas-based filmmakers and fans during Variety’s Southern Storytellers panel at the Filmland festival and conference in Little Rock. Co-founder of Filmland (and director of 1960s motorcycle club saga “ The Bikeriders ”) Jeff Nichols presented Domingo with the event’s inaugural Southern Storytellers Award, before joining Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge in steering a wide-ranging conversation about the craft with Domingo and half a dozen other writers, directors and producers.
On the prison-set, rehabilitation-through-art drama “ Sing Sing ,” which screened the same day, Domingo served as a producer alongside fellow panelists Clint Bentley and Monique Walton. All three shared how their careers had started, explaining that while storytelling may not be the most stable career, they’ve all learned to “hustle” to sustain it. “I don’t like the word ‘struggle,’” Domingo said, recalling a conversation when somebody told him, “I remember when you were a struggling actor.
” The description caught him off-guard. “I said, ‘You do? Because I don’t.’ I’d never considered myself a struggling actor, because I feel like that language sounds hard,” Domingo said.
“I’m not grinding. I’m actually doing the work, and it’s exciting, and it’s not negative.” He identifies more with the word “hustle”: “I had a few jobs.
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