Two Black Boys in Paradise | Interview with Dean Atta, Baz Sells, and Ben Jackson
In anticipation of the second edition of INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening, this time happening at Cardiff Chapter in collaboration with Cardiff Animation Festival, we had the chance to dive deeper into one of the films that will be screening on Saturday the 23rd. Based on the poem by Dean Atta, Two Black Boys in Paradise (2025) is a stop-motion short film narrated by Jordan Stephens. It follows the two boys – Edan (19) and Dula (18) – on a poetic journey of queer love and self-discovery, where paradise is not just a place but a state of being; fragile and threatened by internalised fear, shame, and societal expectations. Skwigly had the chance to catch up with Dean Atta, Baz Sells and Ben Jackson ahead of the INBETWEENS screening. Before we dive deeper into your film Two Black Boys in Paradise (2025), could you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your creative work and roles in the making of the film.
Dean Atta: I am a poet and author. I wrote the poem that TBBIP is adapted from. I have been writing and performing poetry for over twenty years and have also been writing young adult novels more recently – the most well known being The Black Flamingo. I write about black and queer issues in a lot of my work and I am black and gay myself. It has been really lovely to see how my words are travelling now, through the film, all over the world, which is a dream come true.
Ben Jackson: I am the producer on TBBIP and co-founder of One6th, which is the production company Baz and I set up in 2018. I have produced a couple of other short films with Baz before this and wanted to make a film that explores LGBT+ themes as I had been struggling a lot with my sexuality. I didn’t come out until I was 30 – once I moved to Berlin, actually. My boyfriend mentioned a poetry event in Berlin that Dean was at. TBBIP was actually one of the poems that Dean read there and it did really stick with me.
Baz Sells: I am the director of TBBIP. Ben, Dean and myself were all involved in the writing of the film. I am also co-DOP on the film. Me and Ben first started making stop motion together at the Northern Film School – Leeds Beckett now. Since then, our films tend to lean into social, political subjects. Ben came out ten years into our friendship but before then we hadn’t really had that conversation and I always just assumed Ben was straight. So making this film was a very personal process for our friendship as well, because we got to know more about each other. We got stuck into developing TBBIP in 2020 but it wasn’t without a little trepidation I have to admit, because I am straight and I am white myself, so there were some tough questions asked and we had a few discussions between us. I was committed to listening as much as I possibly could. It wasn’t always smooth sailing but we all dealt with the subject matter and the conversations with openness, understanding and grace.
Two Black Boys in Paradise (One6th)
The poem Two Black Boys in Paradise is part of a poetry collection from 2022, called There is (still) love here. I couldn’t help but notice that the book cover looks very similar to one particular shot in your film where the two main characters Dula and Edan are floating together underwater. What were your original inspirations and visions for the poem and how did they eventually translate into the film?
DA: I wrote the poem several years before 2022. We were already beginning to make the film when the book was published. We were able to use some of the concept art that Sanna Räsänen had made. The poem was first written for the Courtauld Gallery. They were having an event in which they wanted poets to respond to different artworks. I chose the portrait of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and wanted to reclaim Eden for black, queer people. As someone who grew up Christian, I always felt it was a story that I didn’t have complete access to. I heard the phrase a few times in my youth: “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” That stuck with me. There is a line in my book The Black Flamingo where I mention Two Black Boys in Paradise: The character of Michael imagines having a black boyfriend and what that would be like. It’s about self-acceptance and the loving of other black queer people. You’ve got to love yourself first before you can really love anyone else – that is what the poem is about.
It’s been a few years since you started working on TBBIP and I was wondering if we could travel back in time and get a little insight of how it all began?
BJ: It was summer of 2020, when I approached Dean and we started putting moodboards together. It was a really long process and a year of development before we applied for BFI funding. By the time we applied for it we had done absolutely everything we could to make this as strong as possible. At the end of 2021, we found out that we got the funding and then it was another six months of admin and paperwork before we got into pre-production.
BS: Looking back it’s been a very long road. One of the things that still sticks with me was the writing process after Ben sent Dean’s poem over. It was such an enjoyable and singular creative experience for me because the poem is so strong and lends itself well to a visual interpretation. It was really beautiful. What struck me reading the poem initially was that it really challenged me. Dean’s voice is so strong, bold and unapologetic and I feel like the poem itself is really confident in its own identity.
DA: There is no police in paradise. That line, I think, a lot of people can get behind, because we’re seeing these boys being criminalised for something they haven’t done and we’re saying this wouldn’t happen in paradise. But then the poem also says: There are no white people in this paradise. This paradise is the paradise between the two black boys. When I perform the poem, I sometimes look into the audience at the white people for their responses. I am actually mixed race, I’ve got a white mum, so what does that mean: there are no white people in this paradise? For me it was important for the two boys in the poem, that they have this moment where it is just the two of them. They can be fully themselves with one another without interruption. No one is asking who they are, they are just together.
BS: In 2020 we were experiencing growing momentum and coverage of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It was a time in which there was a lot of debate around these subjects and I loved that Dean is willing to go there.
DA: The Black Lives Matter movement is still really strong and our film is one way of expressing that in an artistic way. Some people will organise in the community, some people will march on the streets, some people will write to their politicians and some people make art. There are so many ways to express that black lives matter.
BJ: And I love that shot of the film, how proud Dula walks away and leaves the policeman behind. With this film it was important that it was a celebration, that there was joy coming through and a feeling of belonging.
Camera & Lighting Assistant Ann Li Ho & Co-DOP Kevin Paul Lawrence working on TBBIP paradise set (One6th)
Within the poem and film, you have created two opposing worlds. The paradise realm, where the two boys are free. Where you can feel the love and tenderness. You also have the market world where the boys are facing marginalisation, and societal pressures. These spaces are differentiated by the visuals, sound and narration. An element that occurs both in the poem and the film is the apple. What were your intentions behind choosing the apple as a bridge from one world to the other?
DA: In the poem, the apple was inspired by the garden of Eden and the temptation of Adam and Eve. In the film, the boys reach for the apple and are dragged out of paradise. They are accused of stealing this apple that had just appeared out of nowhere. It is about the distraction that homophobia and racism is for us to be able to just live our lives. The boys are treated with suspicion and then defiantly decide to come back together, kiss and return to paradise, where none of this will bother them. The apple can mean many things and we chose intentionally for paradise to be as real as the market stalls. Both these spaces in our film are real and we treat them as such.
BTS of the TBBIP Market Set (One6th)
The visual distinction between these two worlds is really well crafted. Things that come to mind are a pub in the background called The Red Herring, cracks and puddles in the road, red warning signs that are part of the background. Could you give us an insight into the concept behind the look of the film?
BS: Although the worlds are different tonally, there are a lot of recurring shapes. The houses in the market have a similar silhouette to the mountains, the lampposts are a similar shade of green to the trees in paradise, the shape of the puddle is the same as the shape of the lake. I don’t want to point all of them out because I want to leave them for people to discover themselves but there are lots of little Easter eggs and visual ties between paradise and the market. Both of these worlds can be as real as we want them to be. From a design point of view, we were very much focusing on creating characters and shapes that were imperfect because we wanted to embrace the feeling and belief that beauty can come from imperfect forms and that there is beauty in everything.
I am really interested in the process of making the puppets for your film, could you talk a little bit about the making?
BJ: It started with concept art, which Sanna did, and then based on that, she made sculpts out of plasticine. From that moulds were made. We had different types of armatures. Most of the background characters were wire armatures, but the boys, the police, and the judge were ball and socket armatures. We had two sets of naked boy puppets and a set of clothed boy puppets. It is rare to get naked puppets – and for good reason. They were not easy to work with, especially the underwater shot with the position the boys were in. They were splitting all the time mid shot and had to be fixed by the animators. We were often only getting ten to twelve frames a day on that shot. The eyelids and mouths were 3D printed and I spent days and days sanding eyelids to get them smooth. We achieved Albert’s certificate for sustainable production on this film, so we were trying to be as sustainable as possible. One of the most sustainable things to make hair out of is real human hair, so the hair was made out of a mixture of real human hair and felt. Dula’s locks had to be animated so we drilled holes in the top of his head, loads of little holes, and then glue each lock into the holes so that it could be animated independently.
BTS shot of Dula and Edan underwater with key animator, Kecy Salangad (One6th)
There’s one puppet that only occurs in the paradise realm. A big majestic bird that also looks happy and goofy with big round eyes. What was the idea behind this bird character?
BS: On the climax shot we wanted to provide this beautiful backdrop that was an absolute celebration of these boys and what they represent. But then it became also a representation of an audience member that might not be familiar with this kind of film. He always gets a laugh. Every time we go to a screening, there is always a point at which everyone chuckles and laughs. We deal with such heavy subject matters in the market, and they’re all vital, but before going into the sex scene, you want to feel like you’re changing the tone slightly and bringing in a more lighthearted feel. For me, the peacock is a representation of how I hope people will absorb the film: with curiosity and an open mind.
DA: I was really excited to hold that puppet when I went to visit the studio. I like its goofiness and I like the comic moment that it kind of allows to happen and the relief that it gives to the audience members after some of the heavier stuff. It’s an essential character in the film.
Every time I go on social media these days, a new laurel seems to have been added to the film. What has the reception of the film been like so far and where is the journey taking it?
BJ: The reception has been absolutely overwhelming. We’ve been very lucky to be selected for the biggest and oldest LGBT+ festivals, which is really amazing and obviously helps us reach a queer audience, which was always our intention. The feedback we’ve had at festivals has been amazing and touching – it makes the whole process worthwhile. We have been selected for quite a lot of Oscar-qualifying and BAFTA-qualifying festivals. I am currently in the process of doing our Oscar submission and we’re waiting for BAFTA to open. We do have ambitious hopes, but we’ll see how awards season goes. Actually, on the note of awards: over the weekend, we did win Best Stop Motion Short at the Portlands Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology.
DA: An audience member, who was black, queer and nonbinary, came up to me and said: “I came along to this, thinking I’d only be partially seen because it was about two black boys in paradise, but then at the end, when you open up paradise to trans and non-binary people and everyone, I felt completely seen.” That was a really lovely feedback. The majority of the film is about the boys, but at the end, we do open paradise up for anyone that needs it. Everyone involved in the film has been so proud to have been involved in something that’s doing so well. By the time we got to the crew screening, we all saw that we’d made something special.
BS: I also know that the film festival circuit can be quite difficult. Everyone will see the laurels, we upload, but obviously we don’t share the rejections we get – and there are rejections. It’s a very difficult time for the animation industry, and for any filmmakers that have their film out there. Every film is a small miracle to finish because it takes so many moving parts, and to put it out there is another act of bravery. From that point of view, I’m almost wary to portray an image where it’s constantly win after win for us, even though I’m really enthusastic and happy that we’re getting these kind of selections and such great opportunities. The animation and film community has just been outstanding, just so brilliant and supportive, and that has been one of the lovely things about this journey as well.
Dean Atta in front of the TBBIP paradise set (Leona Gasper)
If you would like to catch the film and dive into the world of Dula and Edan yourself, you have the chance to do so on Saturday the 23rd of August at Chaper Arts Centre inCardiff where the next edition of INBETWEENS – Queer Animation Screening will be held in collaboration with Cardiff Animation Festival.