For Black youth leaving care, the hardest call to answer is finding a home.
WE WILL CALL YOU SHORT FILM POSTER
Logline
When Darius, a young Black man aging out of foster care, sets out to find housing with identical credentials to his white peer, he discovers the doors don’t open equally. What begins as a hopeful search spirals into a relentless pattern of rejection, exposing how discrimination wears a polite smile.
Synopsis
We Will Call You follows Darius, a 20-year-old Black youth aging out of foster care, as he navigates the brutal housing market alongside his white friend Liam. With identical jobs, paychecks, and references, their outcomes are starkly different: Liam is welcomed, while Darius is met with excuses, silence, and rejection.
The film uses powerful visual metaphors—a binder fraying under pressure, juggling lessons passed down to younger youth, and the fragile hope symbolized by a basketball—to reveal how systemic discrimination quietly but persistently denies Black youth a place to call home.
The story ends not with resolution but with a haunting truth: resilience is not enough when the system is designed to keep you out.
Technical
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 10’
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Screening Formats: 2K 5.1 DCP, 16:9 (standard UHD) (French subs), ProRes.
Sound: 5.1 or Stereo.
Shot on Sony FX3, 24p, original format 2.8K
Language: English.
Subtitles: English, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic.
Director’s Statement – We Will Call You
This story grows from the voices of youth who leave care with little more than a binder of documents and the weight of expectation. I wanted to honor their persistence without reducing their struggle to statistics. The binder, the juggling balls, the basketball—these small objects carry big meaning: tools of trust, of balance, of hope. The film stays close to Darius’s body and breath, inviting the audience to feel how each polite rejection chips away at dignity while larger systems quietly close the door.
We Will Call You emerged from Productionflux’s Lived Lens program, an initiative designed to center youth with lived experience in both performance and production. The script was shaped by conversations with young people navigating housing barriers, and the cast includes participants whose own histories of discrimination shaped their portrayals. Youth also worked behind the camera, ensuring that authenticity was embedded in every frame.
I also carry my own lived experience of systemic exclusion. As a Muslim student in New York after 9/11, I often faced the same quiet distrust these youth encounter—sleeping in parks when housing was denied, or being told spaces were “already taken” when I knew otherwise. That memory drives my urgency to tell this story in collaboration with the young people whose lives echo in We Will Call You.
Mohammad Anwerzada: Director/Writer/Producer
Lived Lens Films is a storytelling initiative by Productionflux that places people with lived experiences at the center of filmmaking. From acting to writing to working behind the camera, participants shape authentic narratives about housing, care, and resilience—turning personal stories into powerful films for change.
We Will Call You is one of the Lived Lens films, created in collaboration with REST Centre, which advocates for housing equity for racialized youth facing systemic discrimination. These works form part of a larger series of advocacy films for change under Films for Change, a program of Productionflux Inc.
