[Premiere] Watch The Musical Trailer For Harlem-Based Film ‘Chapter & Verse’ Starring Loretta Devine, Omari Hardwick & More

Here’s the musical trailer for the movie Chapter & Verse, a film starring Omari Hardwick and Loretta Devine. The movie will premiere on the STARZ Network in the spring and will premiere on BET this summer.

Directed by Jamal Joseph, the film contemplates fatherhood and step-fatherhood, and the plight of black boys with no fathers. Its protagonist is an unlikely paternal figure, a former inmate who goes home to Harlem and meets the boy he never expected to meet, the one who compels him to revisit his own fatherless boyhood.

During the on-location shoot in Harlem, Joseph’s diverse crew included a directing unit comprised of black men armed with walkie-talkies. Neighborhood children would often gather to watch the action. “Black boys would ask my crew: ‘What are you doing?’” Joseph says, in an interview at his 135th Street office. “Black men with walkie-talkies who aren’t cops are an unusual sight.” Instead of telling the children to move away, Joseph had the men explain their filmmaking roles, and invite the children to participate in them. “We would bring them closer,” he says. “Can you imagine what that meant?”

A former Black Panther, Joseph is a Columbia University film professor, screenwriter and author; he earned college degrees while serving time in Leavenworth. Like Lance, his protagonist in Chapter & Verse, Joseph grew up without a father. So did his accomplished star, Daniel Beaty. “Daniel and I know what that ache feels like,” Joseph says, “and we know what it is like to have to heal it yourself.” In Chapter & Verse, a title that suggests the film’s archetypal underpinning, Joseph crafts a heroic tale for Harlem.

While Joseph’s film is very much about black men and boys, he pays homage to the role of mothers and grandmothers in black families through Miss Maddy (Loretta Devine) “Miss Maddy is a combination of great women that I have known throughout my life,” the writer-director says. “She is my adopted grandmother Afeni Shakur, who just passed away and who was my big sister in the Black Panther Party.”

The film’s soundtrack features an original song called “Chapter & Verse” written and performed by Justin Martin, Eric Mobley, Ice Prince & Naeto C. The soundtrack also features music from Tribe Called Quest, and Mansion Records artists Jindai and Eddie James.

Watch the musical trailer below!