Jay Pendarvis Jr. on See You Soon, Grief, and the Stories Only You Can Tell

https://youtu.be/vI5vn_PC4Pk

See You Soon runs about ten minutes.

But it carries the weight of a feature.

That's by design. The award-winning short, which director Jay Pendarvis Jr. discussed with Kickin' It With Tyree, is a proof of concept for Brothers Keeper, the feature Pendarvis wrote during his senior year at the University of Virginia in 2024.

The story centers on grief, brotherhood, and what it feels like to lose someone to gun violence, an experience Pendarvis was confronted with himself.

"You start to see the differences of death," he explains, comparing the loss of a grandparent you knew would leave this world someday to someone who is "literally just ripped out like that." How do you cope with that? How do you deal with it?

See You Soon is his answer. Or at least the beginning of one.

Opening With a Conversation

For a film about grief, See You Soon opens in an unexpected place: two people in a diner, talking about music.

That, too, is by design.

"I love good conversations," Pendarvis says, pointing to Quentin Tarantino as an influence. "No matter what the movie is about, that first opening of the movie, you're just getting two characters having a conversation. You might have nothing to really do with the plot, but you get who these characters are."

The music debate is the kind brothers have all the time, the kind that sometimes leads to fights, but it's all in love. And it lets the audience live inside the story before the weight of it arrives.

Because that's how grief actually works, Pendarvis argues. "No matter how much grief you have, there are always moments where you laugh and have regular moments in your life. You're not consistently just down the whole entire time."

One Diner, Two Nights

The diner setting served the story and the budget at the same time.

Pendarvis and his team raised the money themselves, so the production had to be contained: one location, shot overnight across two days. That was all they had.

But the diner wasn't just practical. It was pulled from the world of Brothers Keeper, which features its own diner scene, another brotherly conversation with something underneath it driving the story forward.

"Any place I can just have characters just talking," Pendarvis says, "I'm just like, yeah, let's do it."

The Lesson of Asking for Help

Ask Pendarvis about the biggest lesson from crowdfunding the film, and his answer isn't about money.

It's about community.

People he'd known since high school, people he only kept up with on Instagram, came out and gave to bring the film to life. Before there was a cast. Before most of them had read a script.

"They believed in the story, but also they believed in me as a filmmaker," he says.

The takeaway stuck with him: "Asking for help in the right moments from your community is the biggest thing that I've learned. You can't do everything on your own."

Casting Asante Blackk and Isaiah John

See You Soon stars Asante Blackk (When They See Us) and Isaiah John (Snowfall), two actors Pendarvis had watched and admired through high school and college.

Getting them wasn't about a flashy pitch. It was about honesty.

He sat down with Blackk in person at an LA coffee shop for an hour and a half. He met John over a video call. In both cases, the conversations were long, honest, and about where the story really comes from.

"When you come from that space of being as honest as possible as a filmmaker about where your story comes from," Pendarvis says, "if that really resonates with somebody, they will come on to it."

Building the World of Brothers Keeper

If See You Soon is ten minutes in a diner, Brothers Keeper is the whole world.

Pendarvis, who is from the DMV area, wants the feature to feel deeply rooted in Virginia and Maryland, carrying the culture he couldn't fit into a single diner. The feature expands the cast, including the crew behind Dominique, the older brother, and more of Kayla, the girl Amari talks to in the diner.

And it complicates the idea of heroes and villains.

"It's not easily just protagonist, antagonist," he says. "It's human beings that are going through the same cycle, making decisions that may or may not be right or wrong, but you can at least understand why they're making those decisions."

Advice for Young Filmmakers

Pendarvis has one piece of advice for filmmakers afraid to take the first step, and he knows it sounds simple.

Just jump into it.

"You don't have to say I'ma start tomorrow. You can literally just open your computer and start right now."

His first draft of Brothers Keeper was full of mistakes and typos, maybe 80 pages at most. He learned as he went, reading screenwriting books while he wrote. The point was that he never stopped moving.

And for the stories you're scared to tell? Those are exactly the ones to write.

"The things that are deep in your heart and deep in your mind, that if people know about, they might look at you differently, those are the things that no one else can tell except you."

The Takeaway

Five or ten years from now, Pendarvis hopes people look back on See You Soon as more than a calling card.

He hopes it helped people understand parts of life they never experienced themselves. He hopes a young Black man's grief on screen can resonate with someone whose life looks nothing like his.

"When those things start to happen, we become closer to each other."

That's the real project behind the project: empathy.

See You Soon is just the beginning.