2016 Los Angeles Film Festival World Premiere

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Partially filmed in the Detroit housing project where Diana Ross grew up, Destined (2016) asks to what extent someone’s destiny can be changed. Directed by Qasim Basir, the film comments on America’s racial and economic divide in a complex and nuanced way.

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Cory Hardrict [Gran Torino (2008), American Sniper (2014)] plays the dual role of Rasheed and Sheed. Other stories have explored how two brothers or two friends wind up on opposite sides. Here, the film flips back and forth between the parallel lives/universes of a single character who in one world becomes an architect set to redevelop his old neighborhood and in the other a drug lord who rules that neighborhood by fear. Everyone in Rasheed/Sheed’s orbit has a counterpart in the parallel world.

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For instance, the architect’s white mother is lifted out of poverty while the drug dealer’s mom stays in the projects helping him in his illicit business. Margot Bingham (Boardwalk Empire) also has a dual role as Maya, the guilty conscience of the ambitious architect and a single mother who was a childhood friend of the drug kingpin but who now fears for her young son’s life.