Though the journey of making a film may be challenging and circuitous, Khary Jones is more than up for the challenge. He’s a man who knows the three-act structure like the back of his hand: At Tufts, he teaches multiple sections of “Screenwriting” — among other electives and directed studies — each semester.
But with his latest film, “Night Fight,” Jones looks to transcend the boundaries of filmic expression overall. As he describes it on the film’s website, the motion picture is merely his vehicle to search for the answer to a nearly impossible question: “What does it take to document a feeling?”
It’s a feeling that’s lingered in Jones’ mind since 2017 — or maybe longer. Visiting Collingwood, Ontario for a family vacation, Jones was pursued by a white man in a pickup truck for more than 20 minutes in the early morning. As he notes in the film, this was only days before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the years since, Jones has grappled with how to express the emotional scars that he was left with following the incident.
It started with his experimentation in making short “video self-portraits” more than five years ago.
“In the midst of COVID, I had this body of work already that I was quite confused about in terms of what it meant and why I was doing it,” Jones said. “[It felt] like it needed to not be private, but I needed to find a way to make it public.”
Unsurprisingly, Jones ultimately decided to resist the confines of a single form, instead turning “Night Fight” into a hybrid work that combines documentary, scripted narrative and experimental video. Jones may be a narrative storyteller by nature — he studied English at Morehouse College, got an MFA in film directing from Columbia University and now teaches fiction writing — yet he still finds himself drawn to other modes as well. When he moved to Los Angeles with his wife after film school, he quickly fell into the documentary world, discovering a new, high level methodology along the way. Since, Jones has been drawn to use a variety of forms to express himself.
“If it’s not a question of trusting these different paths, it’s a question of not wanting to leave behind these different tools that I now feel quite close to and comfortable with,” Jones explained. “I think that’s what I've been trying to do, is to bring them together.”
With its 78-minute runtime, “Night Fight” was the shortest film to screen in the “Visions” category when it premiered at South by Southwest in March. What the film lacks in length, though, it makes up for in ambition — its brevity belies the weight of the questions it dares to ask.
His approach to encapsulating the Black experience contains three layers: the personal, the familial and the collective. Each layer may utilize its own form — the personal through monologue and self-portrait, the familial through conversations with his sons and the collective through interviews with Black scholars and artists — yet there are clear throughlines: Eric Masunaga’s hollow, atmospheric sound design underpins much of the narrative, while recurring visual motifs in interviews and video self-portraits bind together its general themes.
Jones described making any film as a puzzle; “Night Fight” was surely one of the hardest he’s ever had to solve. He first presented the film in March 2024 during the “Working on It” section of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival in New York. A year later, Jones has returned with what he calls a “wholly different cut,” although he says it still shares the same DNA as the original.
“From the very beginning, there was this scripted narrative thread that was a part of the project,” Jones said. “There was always going to be this process of self-exploration, where I was revisiting these self portraits that I had done and trying to understand what they were.” Though much may have shifted in Jones’ years of work, the final product remains true to his vision: “They’re different films, but it’s like the same child, and that’s something I’m pretty proud of, because it gives me confidence in the process.”
Nobody knows where Jones’ work will go next. Perhaps he will be revisiting a narrative script he penned before the production of “Night Fight” got underway — or maybe that, too, will become something entirely different. For now, Jones is hoping that his picture, which continuously touches on the theme of unity, will help “make connections beyond the personal into history.”
“Night Fight” may have begun as a personal reckoning, but it ultimately becomes a shared meditation. As Jones searches the past and future for answers, what emerges is deliberately unresolved. After all, wounds don’t vanish; they become part of who we are.
“Night Fight” will screen as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston on April 28.
