Will. 1981. USA. Directed by Jessie Maple. Screenplay by Maple, Anthony Wisdom. With Obaka Adedunyo, Robert Dean, Loretta Devine. New York premiere. Courtesy Janus Films. 73 min.
A landmark of independent American cinema, Will represents the culmination of Jessie Maple’s determined path through the film industry’s racial and gender barriers. After training at Third World Cinema and honing her craft shooting local news for WABC-TV, Maple became the first Black woman to join the East Coast camera union in 1974. Her early work included news coverage for CBS and NBC, with assignments ranging from local politics to the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee.
Maple’s hard-won experience behind the camera informed her directorial debut, bringing a documentarian’s precision to this intimate portrait of a former college basketball star’s struggle with addiction and redemption in Harlem. The film’s protagonist, Will (Obaka Adedunyo), finds the strength to stay off drugs when he becomes a mentor to an orphaned boy, played with remarkable naturalism by Robert Dean. In her film debut, Loretta Devine brings her uniquely gentle screen presence to the role of Will’s steadfast wife Jean.
Shot on 16mm with a budget of $12,000, the film exemplifies the production methods and alternative distribution networks that sustained African American cinema outside the mainstream industry. Maple and her husband, cinematographer Leroy Patton, founded LJ Film Productions to produce and distribute the film, screening it in community centers, churches, and educational institutions.
This meticulous new restoration came from the original 16mm camera negative and magnetic sound elements preserved by Indiana University’s Black Film Center & Archive.
The new 4K restoration of Will (1981) was a joint project between the Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Time-Based Media Archives and Conservation staff, and the Center for African American Media Arts. The source material used for the restoration was a 16mm color print, held by the BFCA at Indiana University. The print was donated to the BFCA in 2005 by the director, Jessie Maple, and is preserved within the larger Jessie Maple collection. Work on the restoration was completed between 2020 and 2023, with generous funding provided by the SI-NMAAHC Robert Frederick Smith Center for the Digitization and Curation of African American History; Prasad (image restoration); ColorLab (film scanning, color grading, and laboratory services); and Audio Mechanics (audio mastering).