The marquee above Oakland’s historic movie palace, the Grand Lake Theatre, read “MANTRAS AT MIDNIGHT, OCTOBER 29” in big red letters above the heads of everyone walking past. Two men dressed in black climbed up and down a ladder beneath the marquee as one of them, the short film’s writer, director and producer, Takai Ginwright, prepared for the next important step of the film’s journey: promotion.
On the corner, Ginwright stood well over six feet tall, with a microphone attached to the collar of his orange jacket. As he climbed up the ladder for another look, he took a phone call from his grandmother and told her about the upcoming release.
“I wanted to tell you, my short film is coming out in October,” he said over the phone.
“What?!” his grandmother asked, trying to compete with the sound of the noisy street.
He repeated his announcement to one of the most important people in his life.
After descending the ladder, Ginwright and his creative partner for the day, Eric Webb, weaved through the crowd of middle schoolers, commuters and cars and into the intersection in search of the perfect shot.
From corner to corner—even standing on the traffic island for a short period of time—Ginwright and Webb peered through the camera’s viewfinder in their attempt to find the best image of the marquee and its message.
The first inklings of the idea for the film came to Ginwright during the pandemic. “It was something that was incessantly gnawing at me,” he later said at the film’s premiere. “When it didn’t leave me alone, it became a necessity for me to do it.”
Ginwright had always thought about making the ideas in his head real. His new film takes his adolescent interests and uses his adult experiences to make them tangible and relatable. He wondered what it would be like to turn the idea of chasing one’s dreams on its head. What if your dreams were chasing you? he thought.
“I’ve always had the desire to tell a story about two people that exist in two different worlds and how they connect and relate to one another,” Ginwright said.
Mantras At Midnight, part science fiction and part love story—and inspired by films such as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 The Double Life of Veronique—places the viewer in a world where the main characters come together, but exist in two different realities. Kiro, played by Abdoul Lamine, and Umi, played by Esther Oluokun, meet only in Kiro’s dreams.
“It’s a story about two people who are discovering who they are in the world, and their purpose,” Lamine said.
Much like most people in their 20s, Ginwright wrote the film while looking for his place in the world, and in that he discovered his sense of curiosity. He was interested in having more life experiences, like a failed situationship, to make the message he wanted to convey clearer. As a child he wanted to know how he was seeing live news from all over the world when CNN was playing in his house, and when he went to the movies with his aunt he thought about the process of filmmaking.
“My aunt used to always take me to the movies,” Ginwright said. “And I would think, how was I seeing a movie that told a story from beginning to end, but then how did it go from different angles? I didn’t understand editing. I didn’t understand how you could see one angle from the left side and then see it from the right side—that concept didn’t make sense to me as a kid. And so I think that was kind of the start of my curiosity.”
When getting into the weeds of making his film, he knew this endeavor was very different from anything he had tried to do in the past. With his sense of inquiry, he initially picked up the camera to do photography, but soon found himself using the features on his blue Nikon Coolpix to make a stop-motion video of his shoes. He had a vision for his creativity.
The Bay is known as a hot spot for unique artistic expression, and Ginwright used his home as the backdrop for this epic short story. In his quest for his own artistic creativity he traded in his handheld digital camera for the ARRI Alexa Mini LF and took it to numerous locations, from Oakland to Berkeley to Point Montara.
“Young creatives like Takai Ginwright remind us that Oakland’s future is being written right now—through art, imagination and bold storytelling,” said Carlos Uribe, community engagement manager of arts and culture from the office of Mayor Barbara Lee. “Our city has always been a place where visionaries use creativity to challenge limits and build connections. Films like Mantras At Midnight show how Oakland’s next generation is reimagining the world, and we’re proud to see that brilliance shine on screen.”
His short film cost him $32,190.88 to make, Ginwright said, pointing to an Excel spreadsheet. Seeing the film through to completion required several funding attempts. Not until 2024, after saving checks from his part-time job and gig work, was he able to fully fund the endeavor.
With this money and the help of his team of producers, actors, assistants and more, Mantras At Midnight was completed. But finding his team was no small feat. Ginwright found Lamine through a casting call he set up online, and Oluokun through a quick Instagram scroll.
The two actors embody their roles, as Kiro and Umi, in a way that conveys the emotions and feelings Ginwright wanted to express with his writing. Lamine said that working with Ginwright as a director was a fun experience, one which allowed him to express his creativity as an actor in new ways.
“Takai’s a great director,” Lamine said. “We tried a lot of things in the rehearsal that I hadn’t really been given by any other director. We would do the scene, and then he’ll say, ‘So for this scene, you have three pages—let’s try a take where you’re only allowed to say three lines.’ I think he’s a director who understands communication on a deep level.”
Family, friends and supporters of Ginwright attended the premiere in Oakland, all excited to be part of his first steps as a filmmaker. The film premiered in Los Angeles on Nov. 15, and in 2026 Ginwright will enter Mantras At Midnight into multiple festivals. With this first short-film release Ginwright joins other directors, including Ryan Coogler and Boots Riley, who help the rest of the world open its eyes to Oakland’s beauty.
Mantras At Midnight is “the start of a new beginning,” Ginwright said. “I want people to feel an experience of obsession, desire and a calling to something. There’s always something inside of us that wants to come to life. I hope people take a glimpse of that from this short film in one way or another.”
