Choosing service before hollywood
Truth2Power was founded in the spirit of choosing service before Hollywood, living out a legacy rooted in the harmony of shared inheritance.
When Hollywood filmmaker Jonathan Demme was growing ill, he agreed to travel with his son, Brooklyn, to Standing Rock—to document a story of protection and prayerful resistance. It became his final documentary film before he passed. Soon after, Brooklyn began directing his first short documentary alongside the Ramapough Lenape water protectors.
Through those experiences, Brooklyn discovered a profound truth : that the greatest reward of filmmaking isn’t fame or recognition, but the internal richness that comes from holding a camera in service to another’s healing. He realized that if film could truly be a method for community healing, then the stories must emerge from within the community itself.
A Meeting of Stories
Brooklyn met Ashley Dawson while peacefully demonstrating for equal rights. The pride, dignity, and reverence with which Ashley carried and shared the stories of her formerly enslaved, freedom-seeking, self-liberating ancestors left a deep impression.
Brooklyn recognized immediately that someone like her would be deeply empowered by the strength and perspective a video camera could offer in the course of self-representation.
And that is how a first-time filmmaker came to co-found Truth2Power.
Making it happen
The Early Work
Truth2Power first got busy telling stories—both historical and contemporary—of undervalued African American history and life in and around their hometown of Nyack, New York.
These stories illuminated the historic dispossession of property from Black homeowners of earlier generations, the disenfranchisement of Black business owners, and the experiences of those violated by law enforcement misconduct in the present era.
Ashley grew into her leadership role in local journalistic documentary filmmaking in the wake of the tragic loss of Sean Harris, producing a suite of three short films that honored his story and his family’s ongoing fight for justice.
Service and Education
With friends and family from the Ramapough Lenape Nation, particularly Jeff and Cindy Fountain, Brooklyn and Ashley began offering educational programs in public libraries across New York and New Jersey in 2022.
In 2023, with the help of many institutional partners, they expanded that effort into a free, college-credit-bearing film course : Honoring African Cultural Continuity in Film.
The course emerged as a remedy to the local media’s saturation of anti-Black imagery. Rather than fighting against harmful representations, Brooklyn and Ashley asked : “What if we offered nourishing images instead … stories of beauty, strength, and continuity from across the African diaspora?”
Building Films Together
Following that collaboration with College Unbound, Rockland Community College, Arts Westchester, Finklestein Memorial Library, Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, and the Piermont Police Athletic League, Brooklyn and Ashley went on to create their first fictional feature film : Mountain Lion.
On Mountain Lion, Ashley served as producer and intimacy coordinator. The film went on to win Best Feature Film at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival.
After Mountain Lion, Ashley was inspired to tell her own story and promptly wrote an original work of fiction called That Kid.
Brooklyn remains deeply proud of Mountain Lion and grateful for the recognition it received, as the film’s writer, director, and editor / producer. Yet, in many ways, That Kid represents a truer and deeper success of Truth2Power—the kind of success that defines the heart of Brooklyn and Ashley’s mission.
Filmed in and around the public housing community where Ashley grew up, created on a crowdsourced, less-than-shoestring budget, That Kid embodies the value that stands above money—the value that guides everything we do.
Our Vision
Truth2Power is more than a film company. It is a community project and a creatively educational movement guided by service and the transformative power of storytelling.
We carry forward Jonathan Demme’s legacy of service while amplifying it through Ashley’s ancestral wisdom—honoring our shared inheritance through film, art, and collective action.
Every project and every partnership is rooted in the belief that stories can heal.
