The Brooklyn Rail

In December, I sat down with co–writer-directors Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden in Park Slope while their latest feature The Black Sea (2024) was still on its theatrical run with Metrograph Pictures. The indie dramedy had its world premiere at SXSW last March and continues Moselle’s mission to explore real-life subjects and represent grassroots people with unique stories to tell.

From The Wolfpack (2015) to Skate Kitchen (2018), Moselle has evolved from making gritty documentaries to constructing fictional narratives with a biographical core and nonprofessional actors. With similar realist approaches, she and Harden made The Black Sea on location in a small coastal town in Bulgaria, where they recruited locals to play themselves in the film. Harden also plays its protagonist Khalid, a Brownsville slacker who gets into a foreign fish-out-of-water crisis and embarks on an eventful journey of self-discovery far away from home.

A savvy and earnest Brooklynite, Harden has a comic charisma that naturally draws the audience in. With its digital release this month, the three of us delved into how the film manifests Blackness in an original way. As we’ve seen many American characters going to other countries to “find themselves,” Khalid develops a truly equal relationship with Bulgaria and its people and eventually does find himself.

Weiting Liu (Rail): Crystal, I’d love to know about your personal and professional journeys as a filmmaker since your debut feature, The Wolfpack, which has become a cinephilic favorite. I’m particularly interested in how you continue to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Your sophomore feature, Skate Kitchen, is based on the skaters’ real lives, but it has a fictional plot. What has it been like to have a co-creator by your side this time around?

Crystal Moselle: The Wolfpack’s success made me believe in myself as a magnet for special people. I bumped into the Angulo brothers on First Avenue in the Lower East Side, and one of them asked me what I do for a living. As soon as they knew I was a filmmaker, the rest was history. The same happened with the Skate Kitchen girls. I saw them on a Brooklyn subway and got immediately drawn to them.

By the time I met Derrick, I had already been aware of my power in attracting the right creative collaborators. Together, we started brainstorming ideas right away. He would tell me all these brilliant premises: a concept piece about a Black slave navigating his first day of being free or a TV show based on his real-life experiences of working at Soho House. It was his idea to make The Black Sea in Bulgaria, which works out better than I could ever imagine. As both the film’s co-creator and leading man, he executes nuanced performances better than any actors I know. He’s also a singularly fascinating person who has a purpose. You throw him into a town in Bulgaria, and, within a week and a half, he’s charmed every local even with language barriers. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner to make this film.

Rail: How did you know which Bulgarian locals to cast? There’s one scene where Khalid asks two waitresses at a restaurant if he can work there. But they reject him because his big feet don’t fit in the Crocs-style sandals which are part of the restaurant’s uniform. These waitresses are locals actually working at this restaurant, so we get a slice of real Bulgarian life in this scene. Their comedic ingenuity works magic with how they bluntly and nonchalantly deliver the intentionally funny lines.

Moselle: Because the film has a small budget, we constantly kept an eye on well-lit cinematic locations that would look good on camera. We prioritized optimizing the logistics of location shootings over picking whomever to cast as non-actors. But the two local waitresses definitely make that scene you refer to. When we asked them to be in the film, we didn’t expect them to slay this much. Their genius performances on the spot caught us by surprise, too. Initially, we just wanted to shoot a scene at that restaurant located near a cliff overlooking the ocean beneath. And glowy natural lighting always seems to fill up its space, too.

Jackson Hunt is the film’s director of photography, whom I previously worked with on my HBO Max show Betty (2020–21) starring the Skate Kitchen girls. For this film, we couldn’t rely on traditional practical lighting setups; we didn’t even have a gaffer. Jackson is a godsend to conjure up these moving images of depth and beauty with the equipment he owns. We trusted him completely, just as we trusted everyone else on our team and every local in this town. Our Bulgarian producer, Izabella Tzenkova, who also produced Skate Kitchen and Betty, opened so many doors for us to shoot there. We worked—and played—as a tight-knit family behind the scenes. The supportive working environment reveals itself in the warm, dynamic party scenes with the towners. We were there to have fun first, and everything else just followed.

Rail: Your location shootings have done this Bulgarian town justice. While watching the film, I couldn’t help but think about this trope where an American goes to another country to “find themselves.” Sometimes, it’s a white character looking for spiritual guidance, as seen in Eat Pray Love (2010); other times, it could be an immigrant visiting their (or their parents’) birth country to connect with their roots, as seen in Joy Ride (2023).

The Black Sea feels refreshing in this aspect. Khalid never sets out to “find himself” by going to Bulgaria. He just wants to get some cash from his Bulgarian sugar mama whom he chats up online. As the unexpected yet organic result, he develops a reciprocative, real relationship with the place and its locals.

Derrick B. Harden: It’s funny that the film reminds you of Eat Pray Love. I’d say it’s more like another Julia Roberts film, Pretty Woman (1990), because it starts with Khalid pimping himself out [laughs]. In parallel to Khalid who has money problems, I myself am from an impoverished neighborhood and grew up within the welfare system. When I was young, I would stand in lines at weekends to get free bread and cheese. The Bulgarian locals we met and shot with are also mostly from the working class. And as we were casting the professional actors, Irmena Chichikova, who plays Khalid’s business partner Ina, mentioned to us that she grew up while the former People’s Republic of Bulgaria was still a Communist country. So, she’s also raised within a welfare system.

In the plot, Khalid and Ina put peppers roasted by Bulgaria’s chushkopek onto an open-face grilled cheese, a sandwich made with only one piece of bread. As their diner business starts booming, this hybrid sandwich becomes the customer favorite. I have mastered the art of making open-face sandwiches because I was poor and had to save bread. My personal story inspired this darling meeting of Brooklyn and Bulgarian cultures that anchor the film. Another signature item on their menu is matcha, which Khalid learns to make well from the Brooklyn café he worked at. Matcha is a staple at expensive cafés that continue to open in historically working-class neighborhoods. And Khalid has had mixed feelings towards the beverage until it brings Ina and him closer. In the end, a Black man from Brownsville brings home to Bulgaria—and vice versa.

Rail: I’m from a Communist country, too. And my parents’ generation also experienced waiting in lines for sustenance to get distributed. The fact that The Black Sea brings us all together here at a restaurant in Park Slope speaks volumes about the global world we live in. Matcha could, of course, be a symbol of gentrification within a very American discourse. But the film takes it out of the American metropolitan context, and we get to see it through a naked lens: it’s high-quality tea that originated from East Asia that everybody on earth can enjoy.

I don’t think you intend to send out this globalist message. The film brings out a multitude of human connections because everyone involved is genuine and authentic—and deeper meanings freely flow from this solid foundation. I can’t stop thinking about its enchantingly gorgeous ending that quiets down from Khalid’s kinetic adventures. The sequence immerses us in Khalid and Ina’s mud-baths together in the Black Sea and culminates in an audiovisual meditation on nature and humanity. Tell me more about this rare gem of an ending.

Harden: It’s fitting that you catch the film’s universality from this ending. Here, Khalid, Ina, and their local and foreign friends are completely covered in mud in the water. So, they all look the same. It’s also indeed like a meditation—or a poem—where the pacing of them smearing mud on their bodies and then rinsing them off with seawater resembles the rhythms of a sonnet.

Moselle: We also bumped into that location as we were taking a leisurely walk. We didn’t scope it out through a scout. The ending embodies what it takes to make a realist indie like this—you just can’t overthink or overplan anything. We had to let go of many anxieties about tricky finances, doubts from other industry people, etc., and figure things out as we went along this unknown path. Again, we have everything and everyone mentioned in this interview to thank: Bulgaria, Brooklyn, our talented cast and crew who saw something special in the film, and all the little miracles that happened to come our way.