JINN

Summer is a 17-year old carefree black girl, whose world is turned upside-down when her mother, a popular meteorologist named Jade Jennings, abruptly converts to Islam and becomes a different person, prompting Summer to reevaluate her identity.

Summer initially resists Islam, but eventually becomes drawn to its teachings, particularly around the “Jinn,” supernatural beings who occupy a parallel world and have free will, like humans. Summer soon realizes that the religion is more complex than she thought, and that people interpret it in different ways. Yet Summer’s need to be free and untethered to any one way of being clashes with her mother’s strict interpretation of the faith and causes a growing rift between them.

When Summer meets Tahir, a fellow Muslim classmate who attends the same masjid, she is further drawn to the religion and especially to his parent’s fluid, freeing practice of it. As Summer and Tahir build a connection based in laughter, curiosity, and beef pepperoni, a budding sexual attraction ignites, causing a major conflict between physical desire and piety.

Nijla Mu’min

Nijla Mu’min is an award-winning writer and filmmaker from the East Bay Area. Her work is informed by poetry, photography, fiction, and dance. Named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2017, she tells stories about black girls and women who find themselves between worlds and identities. Her 2011 short film Two Bodies has screened at festivals across the country, including the Pan African Film Festival, Outfest, Frameline and Newfest. Her writing appears in the critically acclaimed book, Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, and she’s also written film and cultural criticism for VICE, Shadow and Act on the Indiewire Network, Bitch Media, Gawker, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2011, she worked as a Production Assistant on Ava DuVernay’s film, Middle of Nowhere.

Nijla Mu’min is a recipient of the 2012 Princess Grace Foundation- Cary Grant Film Award for her graduate thesis film, Deluge, which has screened at BAMcinematek in Brooklyn, Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia and The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). In 2014, she was one of 10 writers selected for the Second Annual Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive. She is the winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the 2014 Urbanworld Film Festival, for her script Noor. In 2015, she was selected for the prestigious New York Film Festival’s Artist Academy.

In 2017, Jinn was selected for IFP’s Narrative Lab and as a recipient of SFFILM’s Rainin Film Grant. In July, Nijla was selected to attend the 2017 Sundance Institute Sound and Music Design Lab at Skywalker Ranch. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley, and also attended Howard University’s MFA Film Program, where she was the recipient of the 2009 Paul Robeson Award for Best Feature Screenplay. She is a 2013 dual-degree graduate of CalArts’ MFA Film Directing and Writing programs.

Avril Z. Speaks

Avril Speaks has over eighteen years of experience as a filmmaker with credits as a producer, writer, director, and editor. She made her directorial debut in 1999 when she directed her first feature film The Round Table, then later went on to complete the award-winning feature film Sophisticated Romance.

She earned her M.F.A. in Film Directing from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City, her B.A. from the University of Maryland in African American Studies and studied film production at Howard University. Upon graduating from Columbia, Avril worked in development for USA Films (currently Focus Features) and the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers.

As an advocate of film education and training, Avril has shared her passion for the arts by volunteering for several film-related panel discussions and festivals, including the Level Ground Film Festival, where she serves on the Programming team. Avril has also been a full time professor at Howard University in Washington, DC. Avril was an Associate Producer on the TNT docu-series, The Race Card, which looked at race in America through the eyes of its controversial host, basketball legend Charles Barkley.

Currently she works on the Production Management team for Scripted Programming at Black Entertainment Television (BET). As a producer for the upcoming film, Jinn, Avril continues to produce, write and direct various film and video projects. She is also a producer for the upcoming feature, Hosea, and is a contributor for the book God in the Movies: A Guide for Exploring Four Decades of Film.