In the racially charged atmosphere of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, filmmaker Khary Jones experienced a terrifying incident. While at a resort town in Canada, a white man in a pickup truck followed Jones, who is Black, for 20 minutes at night, leaving him deeply shaken. The incident followed a similarly threatening encounter with another white man outside Boston a few weeks earlier. 

To grapple with both incidents, Jones created Night Fight, a film centered around a conversation with his son about those encounters and their aftermath. The hybrid documentary includes both fictionalized vignettes and interviews with historians and activists about legacies of racial violence. A professor of the practice in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies who has taught screenwriting at Tufts for 11 years, Jones premiered the film this spring at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin. It will be shown at the Independent Film Festival Boston on April 28.

What made you decide to make a film about these harrowing experiences?

After the incidents, in 2019, I felt compelled to start filming a series of self-portraits in secret, imagining different scenarios, not telling my family or friends about them. One of them is a portrait of me as a corpse that I called the Dead Man; another was me wandering in the woods, not running necessarily, but not comfortable either, that I called the Woodsman; and then there was the Bad Man, a version of me that wanted to find the guy. They were connected to my desire not to hide from these different feelings, but not necessarily wanting to give them language either.

How did those portraits develop into the unique structure of the film?

COVID hit, and along with it news of Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot in the street by vigilantes while running through a neighborhood in Georgia; and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, who were killed by police officers. Suddenly these portraits I’d been doing took on a different kind of meaning. I wanted to give them space in a story that was not just my story, because what happened to me happens all the time to marginalized people, often fatally. It happens to people of color; to women who are harassed, stalked, or assaulted; and to LGBTQ+ people, who are often pursued and attacked. I wanted to bring other voices into a story that was in conversation with these portraits, and sometimes repelled or even repulsed by them, and wasn’t fully narrative.

If students want to make a film based on their own intense experiences, how do you help them process them into a screenplay?

I do get students who want to do that kind of storytelling, either through non-fiction or fictionalizing something that happened to them. In those cases, they don’t always understand what has happened to them, so I try to be gentle. I tell them I am not a therapist or a counselor, but we can talk about the story, and the kinds of things that make all good stories work. Oftentimes in the best films, things happening in the present are caused by something that happened in the past. It’s the writer’s job to create a kind of transparency between past and present, to show how the preceding incident has created the circumstances the protagonist has to deal with.

How do you work with students new to screenwriting to find and develop ideas for scripts?

I begin by asking them to find “fragments,” whether it’s a conversation they’ve had, or a quote that’s stuck with them, or an experience they observed on a train—something that didn’t feel right, or they can’t really make sense of. As they journal about these ideas to try and get a handle on them, eventually one might bubble up into a story, and they move forward with it. What I offer to students is to trust the process, understanding that in some ways a good script is like an aspen forest that grows from many roots into the final product.