For Black youth leaving care, the hardest call to answer is finding a home.

Logline

One Liner: When a teen aging out of foster care and a girl separated from her siblings by a bureaucratic rule each confront the housing system, their parallel stories expose the quiet violence of institutional neglect.

Synopsis

WE WILL CALL YOU interweaves two parallel stories of youth navigating the precipice of homelessness, bound by the silent machinery of racialized housing systems.

A Black teenage boy on the verge of aging out of foster care clings to optimism. His generosity takes shape through mentoring a younger girl, teaching her how to juggle—an act of care that later becomes a metaphor for the impossible balance he is forced to maintain. As he searches for housing, hope gives way to a demoralizing cycle of polite rejections and bureaucratic deferral, where resilience slowly erodes into exhaustion.

Running parallel is the story of the youngest of three sisters, fractured by the system when their nurse mother disappears. As the state intervenes, a cold bureaucratic rule—her age—mandates her separation from her siblings, sending her into foster care while her sisters are placed elsewhere. She clings to a simple, unfinished gesture: a Mother’s Day card meant for a mother who is gone. This fragile token of a fractured family becomes her emotional compass, a placeholder for all she has lost as she searches for a place to belong.

Told with restrained realism, We Will Call You reveals how systemic inequality is sustained not only through overt exclusion, but through silence, delay, and administrative distance—exposing a promised safety net that, through its absence of response and rigid, impersonal rules, becomes a form of quiet violence.

Genre: Drama
Running Time: 25 minutes
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.