Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/9/26 – There are films that make their point by shouting, and then there are films like Redlining, which understand that sometimes the most devastating form of discrimination happens quietly.
Jason Stuart’s powerful short film Redlining stayed with me long after I watched it. Perhaps part of that is personal. I am from Alabama, and there was something about the film’s Southern setting, its rhythms, its accents and its sense of things left unsaid that immediately felt familiar to me. During my recent Zoom conversation with Jason, I told him how much the film had affected me, and how impressed I was by the authenticity of his Southern accent. Jason laughed and reminded viewers that we had already spoken privately about how much the film meant to me.
Click below for our exclusive interview:
But Redlining is much bigger than geography.
At its heart, this is a film about being denied dignity, opportunity and belonging because of who you are. It examines discrimination, identity and exclusion, but what gives the film its emotional force is that those ideas are embodied by people rather than presented as political talking points.
Jason understands why that resonates deeply within the LGBTQ+ community.
When I brought up the film’s themes during our interview, he immediately connected the experience of being shut out to the experience LGBTQ+ people know all too well.
The response to Redlining suggests audiences are connecting with that message. Jason told me the film had already been selected for 13 film festivals, received five Best Film Awards and a Best Ensemble Award, with additional nominations for acting, directing and production design still pending announcement at the time of our conversation. For Jason, the ensemble recognition seemed particularly meaningful because filmmaking, as he sees it, is fundamentally collaborative.
One of the qualities I admired most in Redlining is its restraint.
Jason is certainly not known for being quiet. He readily admits that himself. Yet the character he plays, Andrew, exists in an entirely different emotional register.
Jason explained that the inspiration partially grew from playing a quiet, gentle character in another film and wondering how much further he could explore the life of a man who essentially has no voice. He also wanted to return to the South, specifically Savannah, Georgia, work with the accent and atmosphere, and take audiences into another time.
At the center of Redlining are two men whose relationship has existed for years, largely without acknowledgment. They are not presented as flamboyant rebels or heroic symbols. They are simply men who have built a life together in a world where much of that life must remain unspoken.
Jason described them to me as quiet men — the kind of ordinary people you might pass shopping at Kohl’s or Target without ever knowing their story. Their relationship is simply there, woven into their lives, despite a society that does not necessarily give them permission to name it openly.
That understatement is one of the film’s great strengths.
Instead of telling us constantly what to feel, Redlining allows us to observe. It allows discomfort to accumulate. It asks us to notice what happens when prejudice becomes institutional, habitual and socially acceptable.
Jason cited Terrence Malick as one of the filmmakers whose sensibility influenced what he wanted to create, and that influence makes sense. There is an interest here in mood, behavior and the spaces between words rather than simply exposition.
Jason initially wrote the screenplay himself but knew something was missing.
Enter actress and writer Lee Garlington, a longtime friend whose career includes hundreds of film and television appearances.
Jason told me that Garlington helped reorganize the script, deepen the characters and strengthen the storytelling. He wanted someone he trusted enough to challenge him — someone, as he jokingly put it, who could “boss” him a little.
That collaboration matters because Redlining does not feel like a film constructed around one performer seeking attention.
It feels like an ensemble.
Jason stars, writes, directs and produces, but the world surrounding his character is every bit as important as Andrew himself.
Among the people Jason particularly wanted involved was his longtime friend Alexandra Paul, known to millions from Baywatch. He wanted to give Paul a role that demonstrated the breadth of her ability and showed audiences another side of an actress too often associated with one famous television image. Jason was particularly enthusiastic about what she accomplishes in Redlining, including a character transformation spanning decades.
Jason also spoke warmly about cast members Kareem and Dalila, explaining that Dalila’s character underwent a major transformation during development. The part was initially conceived as a younger white man. As Jason researched Black families and listened to Dalila, Kareem and others in his life, he reconsidered the character and rewrote the role as a Black woman and cousin within the family.
For me, that is an important detail because it speaks to something Jason returned to throughout our conversation: listening.
He did not want to assume he understood another family’s culture simply because he was writing the movie. He sought out the perspectives of the people around him and allowed that information to change the work.
Jason Stuart has spent decades making audiences laugh as a comedian and building an extensive acting career, but Redlining also makes a persuasive argument for Jason Stuart the filmmaker.
And he certainly did not make things easy on himself.
He wasn’t simply the star and director. Jason described himself as the line producer, financial producer and production manager as well. Producing, he told me, was the part of the process that challenged him most because it encompasses practically everything.
His philosophy, however, was to distribute ownership rather than guard it.
Editor and cinematographer Billy Clift, along with other principal collaborators, received producing credits because Jason wanted those who helped build the movie to feel that it belonged to them too.
“It’s not just my film,” was essentially the philosophy he shared with me. It belongs to the people who created it together.
Producer Steve Campbell became especially important to the production. Jason spoke about him with enormous affection and gratitude, saying he did not know whether the film could have happened without Campbell’s help.
Campbell had not previously produced a film, but he brought years of experience working with performers, including his time managing legendary entertainer Jim Bailey. Jason emphasized throughout our conversation that filmmaking is a true team effort, and Campbell became an essential part of bringing Redlining from the page to the screen.
Something Jason said during our interview particularly resonated with me as someone who spends so much time watching films and speaking with filmmakers.
He doesn’t want to make something merely for the sake of completing it.
He wants it to be good.
Jason told me that if audiences are going to leave their homes, sit in a theater or spend their time watching his work, he believes they deserve an experience.
That philosophy goes back to why he became an actor in the first place: entering a darkened theater, settling in with popcorn and a drink, and being introduced to somebody else’s point of view — perhaps learning something he did not know before.
His creative influences reflect that curiosity.
Jason spoke about working with and learning from filmmakers including Sean Baker on Tangerine, Ira Sachs on Love Is Strange and Nate Parker on The Birth of a Nation. What remained with him from those experiences was not simply technique but commitment to craft and point of view.
That philosophy is visible throughout Redlining.
This film wants you to inhabit somebody else’s reality for a few minutes.
And then it wants you to carry some of that reality back into your own.
When I asked Jason what he hoped audiences would take away from the film’s depiction of discrimination, his answer returned to an experience he had while working on The Birth of a Nation.
He recalled being asked on a red carpet what it was like participating in a story involving such painful history. Jason’s response was that the privilege was being able to step into somebody else’s shoes and, most importantly, listen.
That lesson became directly connected to what he hopes Redlining accomplishes.
He wants people to encounter something they may not fully understand and recognize how discrimination actually affects the human beings experiencing it.
That is also what I believe makes Redlining effective.
It does not ask the audience merely to agree that discrimination is bad.
That’s easy.
It asks us to witness its consequences.
There is an enormous difference.
I was especially thrilled to discuss the film coming to Cinema Diverse in Palm Springs, because there may be few audiences better positioned to understand its themes.
For Jason, bringing the film to Palm Springs is also personal. He has built a community here, and several people essential to Redlining, including Steve Campbell and his husband Rock, are part of that community.
The film is also traveling well beyond the desert.
At the time of our interview, Jason told me its upcoming festival journey included screenings connected to the Hip Hop Film Festival in New York, Indie Wood Film Festival and Tarzan International Film Festival in Los Angeles, as well as a queer film festival in San Francisco.
The growing festival recognition is deserved.
Redlining manages something difficult: it takes a subject that could easily become an issue-driven lecture and turns it into a human story.
With Jason juggling filmmaking and his continuing stand-up career, I couldn’t resist asking which version of Jason Stuart was having the most fun: filmmaker or comedian?
His answer surprised me slightly.
Neither.
It’s the actor.
Jason told me that acting remains at the core of who he is because he loves stepping into a character and becoming somebody else. Andrew is particularly satisfying because the character is so unlike Jason himself.
Jason joked that he would never tolerate half the things Andrew accepts. But that difference is precisely what makes playing him interesting.
Comedy, Jason explained, is what brought him success. Filmmaking came later from another necessity — the desire to create rather than wait for somebody else to allow him to do so.
During his work on Smothered with Mitch Hara, the two embraced a philosophy that Jason still carries with him:
“We will not wait for permission to create.”
They would simply do it.
Redlining is evidence of exactly what can happen when an artist follows that philosophy.
I see many short films, and one of their greatest challenges is making an audience feel that the characters had lives before the first frame and will continue having lives after the last one.
Redlining succeeds because its people feel as though they existed before we met them.
They have histories. Secrets. Loyalties. Relationships. Fear.
And they live within social systems that sometimes determine their opportunities before anyone bothers to know who they are.
Jason Stuart has created a film about discrimination, but beneath that is something even more universal: the fundamental human desire to be seen and treated with dignity.
It is thoughtful without being timid, political without forgetting the people at the center of the politics, and deeply personal without becoming self-indulgent.
Perhaps the most important thing Redlining asks of audiences is exactly what Jason himself learned through his work on other people’s stories:
Look.
Listen.
And for a few moments, try standing in somebody else’s shoes.
That is what good filmmaking can do.
And Redlining does it very well.
— Valerie Milano, The Hollywood Times
For more on Jason Stuart, including his film, television, comedy and upcoming appearances, visit JasonStuart.com. Jason told viewers that his social media, videos, résumé and IMDb information can all be found through his website.
Starring:
Jason Stuart, Lee Garlington, Kareem Ferguson, Dalila Ali Rajah With Scott Krinsky
And Alexandra Paul
Linna Carter, Lilo Baier, Anna Garduno, Lela Hoffmeister, Susan Hopper, Brian MGanga, Ivan Sinitsin, Ghalee Wadood, Jr., Ethan Walker And L. Trey Wilson
