Contact Chicago · Africa · The Diaspora
CodeSwitchers Productions creates socially engaged, Pan-African cinema rooted in history, human courage, and collective healing.
Our mission
We recover shared memory, examine inherited trauma, and imagine solidarity across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.
CodeSwitchers brings artists into sustained collaboration with historians, social scientists, and cultural consultants. We use scholarship not as a substitute for drama, but to give every dramatic choice greater depth, consequence, and integrity.
Our films reveal connections among Black communities too often treated as separate—and ask what becomes possible when fractured communities recognize one another and begin to heal collectively.
Featured project
An independent prestige historical drama with thriller momentum.
When elderly American expatriate Freddy Ivory dies rescuing strangers from a fire, a viral account of his final act draws thousands to a public funeral in Burundi. Their contradictory memories reveal the hidden life of a Black American entrepreneur whose access to machinery, transport, borders, and officials became the practical means through which he saved people marked for death.
Set against Burundi's passage from independence into repression and mass violence, The Interceder places a rarely dramatized history inside an intimate mystery of character, conscience, and moral courage.
Watch the video synopsisSelected work
Documentary · Completed
A history of disinvestment, resilience, and community life on Chicago's West Side, told through the people who call it home.
Public affairs · PBS
A national conversation about untreated mental illness and addiction, grounded in testimony from young people, parents, caregivers, and experts.
Narrative feature · In development · Sequel to The Interceder
The sequel to The Interceder: a sweeping political epic braiding oral tradition, Burundi's descent from independence into dictatorship, and one machinery dealer's moral reckoning during the 1972 genocide.
Narrative feature · In development
A grieving Chicago postal worker, once celebrated as a champion and community pillar, is drawn into a clandestine brotherhood that transforms his pain into a campaign of vengeance—forcing him to confront what remains of the man he once was.
Narrative short · Financing
A psychological comedy about a wounded Chicago writer whose fear, bravado, and desire become embodied voices inside his mind—and battle for control when he tries to reenter the world.
Commercial web series · In development
A direct-to-audience cinematic oral-history series: real West Side memories told by the people who lived them, then expanded into mythic, actor-driven reenactments.
We build history around complicated people whose choices make large events emotionally legible.
Historical and cultural consultation strengthens the story while protecting its humanity and complexity.
We confront the forces that exploit difference without erasing the differences that make communities distinct.
Leadership
Centralized creative leadership meets disciplined historical, cultural, social, and production consultation.
Writer, director, producer, and the originator of The Interceder.
Relationship-based fundraising, resource development, and community partnership.
Burundian history, cultural understanding, lived memory, and reconciliation-centered review.
Begin a conversation
For production, investment, institutional partnership, press, and speaking inquiries.
deontay@codeswitchers.live