When he was growing up, Caleb Suggs wanted to be a zoologist. “But when I went to Germantown High School, they have a TV station in their school, so I got involved with that and that kind of set me on my path to major in broadcast journalism and film. When I was at University of Memphis, I got my first film job through the journalism department. My teacher, Roxanne Koch was directing a documentary on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. I got a producing gig, and I edited it and narrated the movie through the film department. I got to do my first film that I directed in 2020, and I have made films every single year since then with my brother. We started the film production company called Studio Suggs in 2021.”
Suggs’ film in Indie Memphis 2024 was the brain child of Debbie Robertson at WKNO-TV. “They came to me, because they knew about what I did in video and film, and pitched to me the idea, because they really wanted um to have something that showed up our local HBCU,” says Suggs. “They saw that other cities had some kind of documentary or program that highlighted their HBCUs, but Memphis didn’t have one. So they wanted them to put LeMoyne-Owen College on the map and raise more awareness.”
Suggs says making The Magic of LOC: LeMoyne-Owen at 160 was as much of a learning experience for him as it will be for the audience.. “I actually didn’t know much of anything about LeMoyne-Owen College at all until we started the project. … I had no idea that it was really the students who spearheaded the desegregation of Memphis, and how they were the main ones doing the sit-ins in town. I learned what the draw was for HBCUs. You know, I’ve never been to an HBCU. I went to the University of Memphis. So I got first-hand experience about the culture. The first thing we shot for the documentary was their homecoming week. It was their 160-year anniversary. Seeing how everybody down there was really a family, and seeing how tight the connections were was something that was just completely new to me.”
Suggs, who had directed indie comedies like “Homeboys Haunted”, was new to documentary helming. “I would say that documentaries are easier than narratives on the front end, but way harder on the back end,” he says. For narrative films “… you plan everything out — the lines, the camera movement, the lighting, everything — all the work at the front end. Then for me, because I typically edit everything, I direct, I know how everything has been shot and pieced together. It’s easier for me to get the skeleton of the film, and then really, editing just becomes putting on the finishing touches. For documentary, you’re showing up and you can’t really set too much stuff up, because you’re just kind of dropping in and following people or setting up interviews. The hard part becomes taking what everyone said and trying to build a skeleton from what you have, rather than from what you’ve planned out. Documentaries just take a lot more time, and a lot of playing around until you kinda get the feeling of the movie and the aesthetic from the words that people give you, not from something that you pre-plan. So especially for something like this, going in where it was my first experience with it. We just had to figure out the vibe of school before we could figure out the real tone and feeling of the movie, and the aesthetic that came with it. The movie is called The Magic of LOC, and it has this magical type of theme to it. We didn’t even know that until we walked in and started interviewing people.”
Suggs says he loves to show his work at Indie Memphis. “I think it’s cool that we have a film fest to go to in town! It gives a lot of people here in town something to do with their movie, once they make it. It gives them something exciting to put it in, instead of just on Youtube. It gives you an audience. It gives you a way to meet other filmmakers. It’s just an overall cool experience. When I was first graduating college, and I had my first movie, that was just like the goal. It is the holy grail of where my movie could end up. Now that I’m a bit older, I’ve gone to other festivals, I realize Indie Memphis is a lot better than a lot of other film festivals around the country.”
The Magic of LOC: LeMoyne-Owen College at 160 screens Saturday, November 16 at 3:15 pm at Studio on the Square. Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.
