AMANDA, the latest film from Award Winning Director, Ty Cooper, is a story about love, trauma, relationships, art and community. Cooper was able to capture the essence of a relatable story through the capturing of what he has referred to as "the art of life." Pulling from his own family's tragedies as well as a sense of community, he wrote the screenplay as an attempt to connect with audience members with similar experiences. He states, "love doesn't exist without the opposite and often, tragedy brings people together more than love does, but love is what makes it worth it."
The lead character in the film lost her mother to cancer when she was only 9 years old. She remembers the suffering of which her mother experienced and not much else. Living with this trauma, the film opens with a 28 year old Amanda, a painter awaiting to get her collection into an art gallery. As she struggles to complete the final piece, she finally finds a hint of love from a regular in her favorite coffee shop. She's forced to face the trauma which has haunted her since the passing of her mother.
Ty Cooper, an Award-Winning Director, Writer, and Producer, was born and raised in New York City in the heart of Harlem. He was born two years after his parents migrated from North Carolina to New York, when Harlem was considered the capital of Black culture. Growing up in New York, Ty was always attracted to the finance and fashion sectors of the city. He attended high school as a marketing major on 33rd St. and Park Avenue. During his teenage years, he worked at Goldman Sachs and Bloomingdale's to satisfy his curiosity about those industries. Accepted by the Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.) and various other colleges, he decided to leave the state for new opportunities and attended Norfolk State University in Norfolk, Virginia. Here is where he founded his entertainment marketing company in his third year of matriculating. He promoted nationally recognized events and had up to 6,000 people in attendance.
Experiencing huge success as a promoter, Ty had a burning desire for storytelling. He wrote his first stage play titled "Please Papa Don't," which attracted over 1,000 people on the opening day. Although he had promoted an astounding 1,300+ events, his desire to become a storyteller grew steadily. His skill to film and direct came from the television commercials he produced for his company's advertising efforts and his clients. In 2005 after promoting a celebrity streetball tour for three years, Ty composed footage from various tour visits. He released the first volume of the New Legends of Streetball DVD with a successful international release. He later wrote more stage plays but focused annually on short plays.
Juggling a promotion and brand marketing firm, he had to take wide gaps between projects to manage his company. However, Ty was able to return to film-making and released the award-winning short film, Mingle, with great success at festivals and through his self-promoted public screenings. He has now turned up the heat with multiple screenplays written with a feature film currently in post-production, Amanda, to be released in 2022 and recently wrapping of the documentary, America's Darkest Future: The Cost of an Inaccessible Early Education. At the time of this writing, he is writing the narrative screenplay, Stain, with production to start in 2022.