Siul Hughes stands in the woods in East Rock Park. The green around him is as lush as can be. He’s a shadow by contrast, his sunglasses and teeth flashing from beneath a baseball cap. “What’s a man supposed to say when man can’t escape the manmade emotion, hate?” he raps. “I’m saying I’m a young man, I don’t want to grow too up. I’m a grown man, I don’t want to grow.” The scene cuts, and there’s a title on the screen: “Take your chances,” it reads, “or watch someone take them from you.”
That’s a fragment from the rapper’s “Revision,” which first appeared on his album F O H but now appears in Hate Fear(s) Love, a new half-hour film from Hughes and filmmaker Collin Knapp that incorporates three songs from F O H and more from an upcoming album to create what Hughes called “a day in the life.” (Click the link above to watch the full movie.)
“I wasn’t supposed to make a movie,” he said. “I was supposed to make a music video. I planned for five minutes. It didn’t happen that way.”
“I didn’t want to sell the story short,” he added.
Originally from Bridgeport, Hughes spent enough time in New Haven’s hip hop scene to do shows and release two albums, 2013’s Lastname Hughes and 2016’s Book of Iza. Shortly after that, as the opening titles to Hate Fear(s) Love relate, Hughes quit his job and hit the road to perform, but always circling back to Connecticut, and to New Haven.
About a year ago, he connected with Knapp thanks to mutual friend Ceschi. Knapp had been doing photography and filmmaking for a couple years, and had just acquired some of the gear he needed to make the quality of movie he wanted. They ran into each other at a Ceschi show at Cafe Nine.
“He said, ‘you changed you hair,’” Hughes recalled of Knapp. “I said, ‘no, it just grew.’”
“I got all this new gear. I want to make something,” Knapp said.
“I came here to make something,” Hughes said. They made a plan to shoot a music video, and met up on a sunny day in July of last year, at 10:30 in the morning. They shot the scenes in order; first came the scenes of Hughes starting his day in his bedroom. Then they moved to East Rock Park.
“I chill in East Rock,” Hughes said. “I love it. You can overlook the whole city. It’s my vibe.” He goes there “every time I’m in Connecticut, for sure. It’s one of the first places I go, if not the beach.”
But in Hate Fear(s) Love, East Rock feels a little haunted, by a woman who first accompanies Hughes and then disappears. By Hughes himself. And by two acquaintances who appear wordlessly in the video as Hughes unspools his thoughtful lyrics.
“I told them to do what they do,” Hughes said. And Knapp kept filming. The idea was to do videos for a couple songs. But Hughes kept seeing things that he wanted Knapp to film. A friend texted Hughes asking him if he wanted to get together later. Ideas began to snowball from there. They moved their shoot downtown as day turned to night, and from downtown to Long Wharf, with that friend in a car. They finished shooting at 11:30 p.m. They had their day in a life.
Brian Slattery
Knapp and Hughes.
“We got lucky a lot,” Knapp said. “Even the post-production process — audio clips, visuals, conversations with people.” After the shoot, they edited for probably two full weeks of time, although that was spread out over months. Hughes kept coming up with small pieces of material. “Throw that in and see how it fits,” Knapp recalled him saying.
“I made all my albums like that,” Hughes said.
“That’s how I work, too,” Knapp said.
“The scene where I get in the car — that dude really called me and picked me up,” Hughes said. “It just happened that way … it’s 1 p.m. You didn’t really have any plans for 3 p.m., but now you do,” And Knapp was there to film it.
The only element missing was an ending. The original idea was to have Hughes just walk away from the camera at the end, the day over. Knapp filmed that footage and they used it for another video. But it didn’t seem like quite the right ending, and Knapp wasn’t entirely happy with how the footage turned out from a technical perspective. They planned to reshoot. Then Hughes had a different, darker idea (which I won’t spoil here). Maybe it was to be taken literally, not necessarily. It was more about the feeling that Hughes hoped to elicit, a sense of connection and disconnection at the same time.
“It’s a feeling type of movie,” Hughes said. The ending works; sharp and harrowing, it feels both surprising and inevitable, and it turns the screw tighter on all that has come before, even as it remains just a little ambiguous.
It was all in the service of Hughes’s idea to show that day in the life of a young, ambitious man facing down an uncertain future. It was about “that feeling of not knowing, but settling for not knowing,” said Hughes.
But it was also about the greater feeling Hughes and Knapp shared; in the city and the state around them, despite the current political climate, “things are not terrible. They could be worse. They have been better,” Knapp said. But as people became more transient and technology seemed to create distance between people more often than it brought them closer, “it feels like we are lacking a certain rare element of human connection and interaction that makes all the material gains worthless.”
“What is going on? What are we missing?” he added.
“It looks like we overlooked humanity,” Hughes said. “How do we be human?” And with that realization came “a kind of responsibility,” Knapp said. “what are you doing to make things better?… We’re at a time when people don’t know what to do.”
But as Hate Fear(s) Love suggests, part of it is about acceptance, too, about “choosing whether to sweat it,” as Hughes said, and maybe sometimes taking things in stride, loosening your grip, relinquishing a little control — which is what both he and Knapp did from conceptualizing the project to filming it and editing it, to the end.
“There’s a lot of living in the moment,” Knapp said. “People are in your life and then they’re not. You’re lucky to have them when they are.”
“Take one hand off the wheel,” he added. “Just relax.”