Love, Brooklyn is about Brooklynite writer assigned with writing a piece on the borough’s renaissance post-COVID. With his work deadline looming, he bikes around the borough, and at the same navigates the complexities of intertangled relationships in his life, including with: Casey (Nicole Beharie), his gallerist ex-girlfriend whom he is trying to remain friends with and who is dealing with her own professional deadlines; Nicole (DeWanda Wise), his new situationship who is a recent widow and new single mother studying to be a massage therapist; and Alan (Roy Wood Jr.), his best friend who is increasingly interested in cheating on his wife. Like Brooklyn itself, our characters are at moments in their lives where they need to leap forward while also needing to hold onto the pasts that have shaped them.

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Love, Brooklyn is a deeply romantic film, focusing on the connections of these characters and how they choose to operate within a changing world, both individually and together. The film’s tone is remarkably lovely in a way that we so rarely get to see from romantic dramas.

The film is the debut feature from filmmaker Rachael Abigail Hodler, and a large part of her intention in achieving this tone was to tell a story of Black people that isn’t seeped in tragedy. As she put it in her director’s statement from the film’s Sundance press notes: “As a filmmaker, I want to tell stories about sensitive Black people who cry and feel, in life not tragic or saccharine… I hope to expand the representation of what it means to be Black and what’s cool about this moment of inclusion in storytelling is that I don’t have to try to represent Blackness as a whole or all Black people. I can be really specific with how I see people, how they love, hide from love and ultimately show up for it. I want to show the soft parts of the people who look like me. I want to show the sensitive bits that show up, not when we are in danger or inferior but when we are in love.”