Roxbury native DeMane Davis was sitting in her niece’s room one day looking at the black and white photos on her walls. Thinking they were pictures of her niece’s friends, she looked closer to discover they were photos of funerals of kids her niece knew that had been killed.

Deeply affected, DeMane wanted to do something more than talk to kids in schools about violence. As a busy advertising creative director, she had limited time. So she wrote a screenplay, something she could do after hours. But it became more than just an exercise; she asked her advertising colleague, art director Khari Streeter, to help her make BLACK & WHITE & RED ALL OVER into a feature length film. After shooting and editing it in 1996, it was selected for the dramatic competition at 1997’s Sundance Film Festival. Despite limited theatrical screening in Boston, the Edinburgh Film Festival, and recently at the Roxbury Film Festival, the film proved to be DeMane’s calling card to the world of independent film.

After the festival, Lynn Auerbach at the Sundance Institute asked DeMane and Khari if they had any new screenplays they could submit to the Sundance Feature Film Program. The prestigious four-week lab annually offers 15-20 emerging screenwriters and directors the opportunity to develop new work under the concentrated guidance of veteran filmmakers. DeMane submitted her screenplay for LIFT, about a former shoplifter who tries to persuade his girlfriend to stop stealing. To DeMane’s surprise, she was selected from over 1000 applicants around the world.

DeMane and Khari spent three weeks in the Filmmaker’s Lab, where they shot scenes from the script on video that were critiqued by their advisors: Denzel Washington, Kathy Bates, Alison Anders, and Martha Coolidge, to name a few. Then they spent a week in the Screenwriter’s Lab where their advisors were no less illustrious: screenwriters Stuart Stern (REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) and Charles Fuller (A SOLDIER’S STORY).

They also roomed in the same house with Kimberly Peirce, whose Lab project became the critical hit, BOYS DON’T CRY, and with whom Demane remains close friends. Kimberly has influenced DeMane’s filmmaking tremendously, and they admire each other’s work. Both are interested in films that have something to say, regardless of subject matter.

After the Lab, LIFT got another "lift" in 1998: it received the first Sundance Institute and Producers Club of Maryland Fellowship, which was established to help Sundance Institute alumni bring their project to the screen (the second award recipient, THINGS YOU CAN TELL BY LOOKING AT HER, starring Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and Calista Flockhart, opens this fall). DeMane and Khari received a $10,000 fellowship to help fund their pre-production expenses, including casting, budgeting, and location scouting. The fellowship also included selling the film’s rights to Japan, a surprising twist for a country that traditionally goes for Black action films, rather than dramas about Blacks.

Naturally, DeMane and Khari received a lot of interest in the script. Interestingly, people "liked the script, but couldn’t see the poster," laughed DeMane. That changed at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival when she showed the script to Cathy Konrad, producer of GIRL INTERRUPTED, KIDS and TEACHING MRS. TINGLE, who showed it to her husband, James Mangold, writer and director of GIRL INTERRUPTED, COP LAND and HEAVY. Konrad became LIFT’S executive producer and simultaneously DeMane’s mentor. Mangold also came on board as a producer, as did John Hart and Jeff Sharp of Hart Sharp Productions, the producers of BOYS DON’T CRY. She and Khari had met Hart and Sharp when BLACK & WHITE & RED ALL OVER was at Sundance in 1997.

DeMane calls LIFT a drama with a little bit of humor mixed in. Although she doesn’t have any personal experience with shoplifting, she knows people who do and understands why they do it. "It has a lot to with materialism," she says. "Materialism allows people to cover who they are and how they feel. Not resolving that prevents them from moving on."

Committed to remaining a Boston-based filmmaker, she and Khari shot the film entirely in Boston this past May. Most of the crew on the film were local and were also very dedicated to the project. "The first day of pre-production, all the crew members introduced themselves, and the line producer and I thanked everyone for working on the film and for taking pay cuts. Many crew members then told me how moved they were by the script," said DeMane, still amazed at how supportive everyone has been of the film.

DeMane and Khari edited the film all summer in New York because there aren’t any places in Boston where one can time a print, and the film’s music supervisors live there. Editing became a fulltime job for DeMane, especially since Khari was on his honeymoon for two weeks.

Before becoming a writer/director for film, DeMane had developed a successful advertising career. At 12, she knew she wanted to be a writer; what she didn’t know was that she would start out writing advertising copy. After studying public relations and advertising at Boston University, she became a copywriter at some of Boston’s hottest advertising agencies, including Arnold, Hill Holiday, and the now defunct Houston Advertising.

After a stint in New York at Kirshenbaum, she came back to Boston to direct commercials at Houston where she forged her now famous creative partnership with art director Khari Streeter. It was during this time that DeMane wrote the screenplay for BLACK & WHITE & RED ALL OVER. In fact, the owners of Houston let the two take a month off to shoot it, and they were very supportive during the editing and post-production process.

When BLACK & WHITE & RED ALL OVER was accepted at Sundance in 1997, she and Khari formed their own agency, The Heat, with advertising veteran Bill Heater (one half of the writing partnership that developed the award-winning "Real Life, Real Answers" advertising campaign for John Hancock) as a partner. The agency was in the vanguard of advertising innovation and creativity. Their famous series of ads for Reebok featuring Philadelphia 76er Alan Iverson received numerous awards and considerable press coverage for its microscopic cinematography, a technique made famous afterward by the movie THE MATRIX.

The transition from advertising to film was not that difficult for either DeMane or Khari. "Making a movie is like making a longer commercial," says DeMane. They had the added advantage of knowing some of the best creative and production people from their work in advertising, so unlike a lot of independent filmmakers they were able to command professional quality production values. She and Khari continue to direct commercials exclusively for Boston-based Picture Park, run by Mark Hankey, under the company name of Two Potato. She’d like to keep doing commercials alongside films as long as making commercials continues to be a challenge.

Among her film heroes are Elia Kazan, Martin Scorcese, the Coen Brothers, and the filmmakers at Holland’s Dogma Films, Lars Von Trier (BREAKING THE WAVES) and Tom Winterberg (THE CELEBRATION). She likes the fact that these particular filmmakers focus on story and that the characters make a journey, either emotionally, physically or both.

As successful and fortunate as she’s been, DeMane is refreshingly modest when it comes to her filmmaking. She’d be satisfied if people just liked her films and got something out of them. She says, "If I’m still doing this 20 years from now, I’d consider myself successful."

Ellen Gitelman is President of American Graphiti, a public relations and promotions agency based in Sudbury, Massachusetts.