The Brooklyn Film Festival has always been a hotbed for independent filmmakers to showcase their latest projects, and the opening film of this year’s edition hails from a first-time feature director. Signs of Love marks the debut of content producer and director of photography Clarence Fuller, with the hard-hitting drama’s full-length trailer now available for your perusal (which you can see here).
Shot on location in Philadelphia, the story follows Hopper Jack Penn’s Frankie, a local youngster dreaming of the better life that seems so far away. Struggling to provide balance and normality to the life of his young nephew, matters that aren’t helped by the influence exerted by his older sister (as played by Dylan Penn), Frankie’s need to escape an existence that isn’t beneficial to anyone only grows stronger.
Things do get clearer and brighter when he meets Zoë Bleu’s Jane, though, a deaf girl from a much more affluent family that live nearby, but cutting ties with the only life he’s ever known is nowhere near as straightforward as it may sound. Cree Kawa and Wass Stevens co-star in Signs of Love, which is set to kick off the BFF festivities when it premieres on June 3.
Written and directed by Fuller, David Michaels and Alexander Norton serve as producers, with Gabrielle Almagor additionally part of the executive producorial team. Although Signs of Love isn’t an autobiographical story, the filmmaker has admitted that the narrative was influenced by his own life experience, which always guarantees a powerfully emotional and personal tale that offers hope for redemption.