Filmmakers to Watch | Shawn Antoine II
Shawn Antoine I Photo Credit: Christopher Zapata
Shawn Antoine II is a singular filmmaker from Harlem whose work quickly marked him as one to watch. He is committed to telling often overlooked stories of the Black experience with care and nuance. A documentary filmmaker, he recently earned his MFA in Documentary Media from Northwestern University.
He began as a college athlete, playing football at the University of Rhode Island while editing youth football footage. After earning his degree in public relations, he went on to produce Showtime (2020), a short film following two friends navigating and trying to escape the streets of Harlem by performing on trains. The film screened at over 50 festivals and aired on Magic Johnson’s ASPIRE TV, helping define his voice as a cinematic storyteller.
Antoine II’s work also extends into education, where he became one of the youngest Directors of Admissions in the country at his alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School. He has 17 credits to his name and has screened at prestigious venues including Lincoln Center, DOC NYC, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. He has also contributed to major projects such as The Penguin (HBO Max), The Blacklist (NBC), and Really Love (Netflix).
His most recent work, The Sight Unseen, is a documentary-narrative hybrid film chronicling a miraculous, spiritual event witnessed by his family in the Bronx in 1971. It incorporates and reenacts excerpts from Melvin Tapley’s coverage of the event in the Amsterdam News, creating a multidimensional portrayal of a personal family event.
About The Sight Unseen
The Sight Unseen came about during an encounter with his great-aunt, who told him a story so astonishing in its events, and so close to being lost, that he felt compelled to tell it. A glowing cross had appeared to his mother in her bedroom window when she was a child. While miraculous, the story had been dismissed by the New York Times, but documented in all its ambiguity by Tapley. With this coverage and family and witness interviews, Antoine II set out to make the film for his MFA thesis and felt responsible for preserving his family’s history.
Why We Love Their Work
His style of filmmaking feels important because he refuses to betray complexity for legibility. He is unafraid to abandon genre conventions to create visual narratives that allow us to experience the seen and unseen textures of the human condition. Screening at 15 and 25 festivals respectively, his films For Those That Lived Here (2025), an evocative short about the residents of the Chicago neighborhood Cabrini-Green, and Kingdome (2024), a film showcasing the transformative power and impact of a basketball tournament and community in Harlem, have also found success across the festival circuit.
Shawn Antoine II is a filmmaker whose career we should be following closely, as his work belongs to a long tradition of storytelling as an act of witness and cultural memory.
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