Filmmaker Mushen Kieta wants to open doors for the next generation

Boston filmmaker Mushen Kieta had his hands full on a Saturday in July. On the left, he held his 2-year-old, Zen. On the right, he held a camera viewfinder up to his face to frame a rare moment of his own siblings reunited.

The scene was both a personal and artistic endeavor for the 34-year-old, who assembled his family at A Street Park in South Boston to celebrate Zen’s birthday. To other park visitors, the gathering might have just seemed like an average family get-together. To Kieta, it was the tail end of a project already eight years in the making: a documentary about the fractures in his family and his efforts to bring them back together.

“I started making a film because my family was divided,” Kieta said. “I figured we don't get along with each other, and we can't really talk to each other. Maybe they can talk to me and a camera, and that way, I can use that medium as a means to get them to be able to listen to each other as well.”

What began as an attempt to bring his family together turned into a discovery of identity for Kieta as he uncovered parts of his family’s history that his parents never shared: an ancestry that includes ties to a Black-owned newspaper and a famed painter who was touted by his contemporaries as one of the best of his time.

Kieta grew up in Roxbury as the youngest of nine children. His parents started their family in the 1970s. It was a time when many Black families in America were reclaiming their identities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the peak of the Black Panther Party. Kieta’s parents met in Indiana and moved several times around the country before settling in Boston. They studied martial arts and Buddhism, changed their given names to ones with Asian roots, didn’t own a television and, for a number of years, raised their children on vegan diets.

“That was not seen at all in Roxbury in the ‘80s,” Kieta said. “We were taught this way of being sort of free and against societal norms. … The way that I describe it is that two black sheep met, spawned a black sheep and then created more black sheep.”

That creative upbringing led Kieta and his siblings toward artistic proclivities. In his early teenage years, Kieta spent time learning video game design at MIT’s Clubhouse Network (more commonly known as the Computer Clubhouse in its early years), then painting, T-shirt printing and filmmaking at Artists For Humanity. He remembers carrying around a camera through the hallways of his high school and seeking out opportunities to make films wherever he could. “Teachers would be like, ‘Oh, we have a project coming up, and you guys need to get a poster board.’ I'm like, ‘Can I make a movie?’”

Kieta crafted stories day and night and dreamt of a future in Hollywood, all while he put those skills to use in various parts of the film industry. It was a filming project trip abroad for an NBC News documentary that made him consider turning the lens on his family.

“A friend of mine hired me to go shoot a documentary on Cambodian deportation. So then we went to Cambodia and Vietnam,” Kieta recalled. “It was eye-opening. It was the first time that I had done something like that, that my camera allowed me to take that step.”

Kieta refers to films he’s worked on as documentaries, but he hesitates to call himself a documentarian. “I think I can tell a good story as a documentarian, but I'm still learning,” he said. This family documentary taught Kieta not just about that style of filmmaking, but also his family’s past: a lineage of art, storytelling and community building that reflects his own life.

Two of Kieta’s grandparents, Henry Whitlock and Edwina Harleston Whitlock, owned and ran The Gary American, one of a small handful of Black-owned newspapers in Gary, Indiana. Later in her life, Kieta’s grandmother worked with National Book Award winner Henry Ball to help complete “​​The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South.”

Kieta’s great-great-uncle, Edwin Harleston, studied under Impressionist painters William Paxton and Frank Benson at the school at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the early 1900s. A 1923 Simms’ Blue Book professional directory archived in the New York Public Library’s digital collection refers to Harleston as “the artist who is generally regarded as the foremost portrait painter of his race in America,” and his works are currently on display at museums throughout the country.

“I'm an artist, and I didn't know that,” Kieta said of this discovery. “We used to go on field trips at Artists For Humanity [to the MFA]. . . I'm just like, ‘Oh, look, it's John Singer Sargent.’ Imagine if I knew that my uncle was there. A great-uncle. Who would I aspire to be?”

Kieta’s current aspirations include expanding Wunderus, his production company that has worked with clients such as Boston Public Schools and the ACLU of Massachusetts. He’d like to take what he’s learned to help give other local filmmakers access to the equipment and fundraising to tell the stories they want to tell.

“I know that I'm not where I want to be but I might be where someone else wants to be,” said Kieta, who remembers the struggle of affording cameras and lights when he was younger. “I'm just doing it for my old self.”

Collaboration and mentorship are frequent themes in Kieta’s professional life. He’s now the director of video production at Artists For Humanity, the same organization where he began to learn the craft of narrative filmmaking more than a decade earlier.

Richard Frank, the director of business development at AFH, knew Kieta as a breakdancing teen and watched him grow into the role he’s in today. “He is one of those supportive teachers who knows when you need a hand and when you can let somebody run a bit,” Frank said.

Frank also has an advisory role at Wunderus, helping Kieta talk through his ideas and ambitions. The two have a vision for the production company as a community of local film industry talent and a gateway for younger generations still navigating the field.

“How do you find collaborators? How do you find the money to produce a project? Especially when you're shooting, you're making a film. There is some expense you have to have,” Frank said. “We want to show them there’s a pathway to this whole being a part of the creative economy.”

For Kieta, filmmaking can do more than tell a story. It has the power to bring people together. The working title for his family documentary is "Kintusgi." It refers to the Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery by reassembling the pieces with a shiny, golden lacquer. In kintsugi, the broken pieces are still visible, and beauty is found in the bonds that hold once-fractured parts together.

When asked what the goal of his filmmaking is, Kieta puts it more succinctly: “Spread the love.”