Photo courtesy Brian Mains at LADD
Kiah Clingman, an actress, director, and producer based out of Atlanta, was in the process of interviewing to be involved in the production of three separate films when she received an email from David Fortune.
The two had connected months earlier, at the Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival in fall 2022. Clingman had been invited to speak on a director’s panel, and the two had acquainted afterwards, sharing a connection over Atlanta—after receiving his graduate degree in film while living in Los Angeles, Fortune planned on relocating to the city—and had kept in touch since.
The email was a pitch, requesting that Clingman come on as a lead producer for his feature film, Color Book. The pitch was “stunning,” she says. Fortune had attached the script, with her name already on it, alongside a visual proposal of an intimate story: A father and son, recently grieving the loss of their wife and mother, navigating the delicacies and nuances of their relationship to one another.
According to Fortune, the film was up for a one million dollar grant as part of AT&T’s Untold Stories program—a pitch program providing resources and mentorship to underrepresented filmmakers—for its poignant depiction of the love and loss experienced by the father, Lucky (Will Catlett), and the 11-year-old son, Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), who has Down syndrome. Shot in black and white—a decision Fortune made to center the characters and dissuade viewers from getting distracted by the world around them—the two explore themes of love, grief, and family. While Lucky finds himself piloting his new role as a single father, he and Mason connect and butt heads with one another, exploring the intricacies of their familial relationship during a journey across Metro Atlanta to attend their first baseball game together.
Clingman knew that she wanted to be a part of the project. “His visual approach was stunning. Seeing that the movie was going to be shot in black and white, I’d never done anything like this. Seeing it pay homage and create this poetic version of Atlanta was very exciting to me. I wanted to be a part of that journey,” she says.
With that, the team got to work. Applying for the grant meant creating a 10-minute video pitch—the equivalent of a short film—to be delivered on stage at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival in front of a crowd of hundreds, broadcast and streamed to thousands more. Impact was the goal. Fortune intended to depict the story of a Black father and son, and while Down syndrome was to play a factor in how he parents his son, it was not to be the focal point of the story. “Not focusing on the child has Down syndrome, but this child just happens to have Down syndrome,” Clingman explains. “They’re a family grieving, just like any other family would. What does that dynamic look like for them as they live their life?”
The impact was evident—Color Book won the Untold Stories grant, and was given a year to create the film in preparation for its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2024. While preparation started immediately, production was pushed back month by month as a result of the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. By January 2024, they were finally clear to begin the project—but they only had five months to completely cast, film, edit, and produce.
Despite the odds, the film was completed, and in the year since its premiere, its garnered a series of accolades, including showings (and awards) at the Tribeca, Chicago International, Denver, Deauville American, and Austin film festivals; and nominations at the NAACP Image Awards for outstanding breakthrough creative motion picture and outstanding performance by a youth in a motion picture. For his part, Variety recognized David Fortune as a “director to watch” in 2025. And on March 6, Color Book will headline the opening of this year’s Over-the-Rhine International Film Festival.
The moment is bittersweet for Clingman. While she considers herself an adoptee of Atlanta, she’s a Cincinnati native at heart. Clingman graduated from Princeton High School and discovered her love for acting and film in the Queen City before moving to study advertising, theater, and history at Howard University. She co-wrote her first short film in August 2019, empowered by her father, James Clingman, who has ALS yet continues to champion her work, including in Color Book. “My dad has been instrumental with rallying the folks to come and buy tickets, doing what he can. He’s going to be there in spirit, and I wouldn’t be from Cincinnati if it wasn’t for him,” she says.
It’s significant for Fortune as well, who is enthusiastic about sharing the story of Lucky and Mason at the OTR Film Festival, the first of its kind created by and for people with disabilities in the film industry. This year, the festival is organized by Living Arrangements for the Developmentally Disabled (LADD), which provides housing, health and wellness, day programs, employment, and advocacy for adults with developmental disabilities.
This wasn’t his first time incorporating disability representation, for Down syndrome in particular, in his work. Color Book succeeds Fortune’s short film, Us, the story of a father teaching his son, who has Down syndrome, how to play baseball.
Photo courtesy Brian Mains at LADD
When crafting the young characters, Fortune found himself drawing on his own experiences working as a camp counselor in Atlanta for children with Down syndrome, engaging with the kids, their parents, and families. To avoid pigeon-holing Mason’s character, he sought assistance from organizations such as SHOWAbility to connect with other families experiencing Down syndrome. “I was hearing their stories, their overall experiences, whether it was challenging or joyful,” he says. “I really wanted to get a true representation of the community.”
The next step was casting. Fortune knew he wanted Catlett, a seasoned actor and producer, to play the role of Lucky. Who would play Mason was not so certain. “One of the first questions [Catlett] asked me was, ‘Will whoever play Mason have Down syndrome?’ That was going to be the deciding factor if he plays the film or not,” says Fortune. “For me, it was obvious, but for him, it was very important … he wanted the physical representation of that space.”
According to last year’s Hollywood Diversity Report, actors with disabilities make up less than 9% of film leads, and less than 5% of all on-screen roles in film. Even fewer are child actors with disabilities.
In the eyes of Clingman, 12-year-old Daniels came to fill the role “in a very divine way.” Just a week prior to the start of filming, the crew had completed casting calls, but had still not made a final decision on who would play Mason. A friend of one of the film’s producers, Daniels’s aunt pitched her nephew for the spot. Impressed by Daniels’s tape, the team made a snap decision to fly him and his parents out to Atlanta.
“[Fortune] really wanted to see a chemistry read [with Catlett], and long story short, we decided to pull the trigger,” says Clingman. “Will Catlett was in town, and we could see them together, and Will left that reading and told David, ‘That is my son.’ The rest is history.”
The personal yet comfortable, silly yet sensitive relationship required between the two actors for a film like this was cemented that day, and according to Fortune, is as palpable on the screen as it was off. “It was legit a minute into them just sitting down and getting to know each other, and Will had his arm around Jeremiah. It was so natural, they weren’t even trying,” he says. “Watching Will and Jeremiah engage, you get to a point at times where you forget that they’re just actors, that they’re not father and son, because they have such an intimate and honest chemistry that goes beyond the screen.” He hopes viewers get to experience the same emotional bond at the screening on Thursday.
Preceding the screening, Color Book leadership will take part in a fireside chat alongside newly minted movie star Marissa Bode, who had her feature film debut playing Nessarose Thropp, who uses a wheelchair, in the new adaptation of Wicked. Bode made history as the first wheelchair user to play the character, and in frequent interviews and press tours across the country, has emphasized the importance of meeting actors with disabilities where they are. She shares her own experiences on the Wicked set working with an accessibility coordinator and choreographer, and adaptations made to the set and trailer to accommodate her disability, among other things.
This concept was not lost on the set of Color Book. According to Clingman, the production team had conversations from the very start of filming to ensure that everyone was comfortable and that Daniels felt advocated for, including daily check-ins with him and his parents.
“It doesn’t matter if he has Down syndrome or not, any child would have different accommodations, so making sure we had those conversations up front and that we were able to flex and pivot as needed, we would advocate [for Daniels] like we would for the rest of our crew and cast,” she says.
Part of that advocacy was simple—according to Clingman, Daniels always wanted a bottle of ranch dressing on set, and the tents they rested in between scenes had to be light colors, because if they were too dark he would get sleepy. Other things required the crew to have foresight and be more proactive—Daniels still had to attend school, and needed a studio teacher who understood how to work with children with down syndrome. The crew had serious conversations with Daniels’s parents about the scenes that they did and didn’t feel comfortable with Daniels participating in. Further, they all had to learn the best way to teach Daniels his lines—talented at repetition cues, he needed some extra rehearsal time to learn on an already-tight schedule.
The end result is one that Fortune feels fortunate to have been a part of, and found that through the process of working alongside Daniels, the story and character of Mason began to take form around him in a way that authentically depicts the nuances of his life.
“He’s a natural, fun-loving kid, and we built the story around him because we wanted it to feel natural to him, we wanted Jeremiah to feel and be himself,” says Fortune. “Because I’m not trying to change who he is. I’m trying to lean into everything that he is.”
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