When Coquie Hughes started working on her first film Sunday After Church in 1997, platforms like YouTube and Vimeo that allow filmmakers direct access to their audiences didn’t exist.
She had tried making her first film years prior, in the early 90s, but it didn’t quite work out. Hughes had just relinquished her scholarship to Xavier University in New Orleans, realizing that she wanted to pursue filmmaking. Stipulations of her scholarship wouldn’t allow her to change her major, so at 18 years old she returned to her home state to pursue her dream career at Northern Illinois University and learned very quickly that as fulfilling as it is, being a filmmaker would have major hurdles.
“I went to Northern [Illinois University] and didn’t like it. I was like, ‘Okay if these people aren’t going to pay for me to go to film school, I’ll pay for it myself,’” she recounted. “I left Northern and went to Columbia College. It was so financially hard being a 19-year-old trying to pay for college, so I ended up dropping out of Columbia.”
Still, the challenges of gaining an institutional filmmaking education didn’t stop the west-side Chicago native. While riding the CTA bus, she saw a production set shooting a commercial. In excitement she hopped off of the bus and asked the person in charge if she could help; right there she was onboarded as a production assistant. This is where she began to learn the ropes of film production.
As she continued to learn, Hughes connected with other locals who were still enrolled in universities, like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was able to begin filming projects with equipment her peers had access to. This resourcefulness not only helped her gain needed supplies—it expanded her network of filmmakers in the city.
“I was just always asking people to help,” she said, laughing. “People were always willing to help because, back then, making a movie was exciting. For screenings, I’d just ask people, ‘Hey, can I show my trailer?’”
One of her more steady roles was teaching theater performance at a Chicago Park District. She got the job due to her success teaching performance to kids in under-resourced communities.
“I took advantage of those opportunities to work with the park district teaching theater to also showcase my films. I was also able to attract a potential investor who came to see a play I wrote called Gotta Get my Hair Did,” she said. “I was able to raise money from people coming in to see the play to actually make my first official film, which was [of the same name as the play]. I distributed that film by buying a whole bunch of VCRs and I’d make tapes. I would go to Kinkos to make the covers for the tapes.”
Since then, Hughes has made an array of films about the range of experiences of Black queer women. A pioneer of creating these independent films in her earlier days of filmmaking, Hughes is still focusing on writing and directing these stories, the most recent one being a pilot called Black and Merry, an anthology series centering Black queer women in relationships facing different challenges.
Since her times of manually creating VHS tapes, Hughes progressed to DVDs and now digital distribution, as most films today are streaming. But as an indie creator whose films have reached people all over the world, pre-digitally, finding an ongoing, long-term distributor for her archives has posed its challenges.
“I was approached by a distributor who wanted to distribute my films, but the terms that they wanted distribution under were not fair to me. Their exclusive contract wasn’t offering me anything up front, yet they wanted all these rights,” Hughes said. “A lot of my counterparts were doing this: signing over their IP (intellectual property), but I had sense enough to not do that because you’re not getting anything for it. It was very predatory.”
Even the digital ways she could distribute her films aren’t as financially conducive for her, so she just asks folks to reach out to her directly for digital access, and to kindly send a donation.
As Hughes continues to create, she dreams of having a deal with a television company or streaming network that “fucks with me. They’ll say, ‘We’re going to give you the budget, and you just do your thing,’” she said. “I also want to have opportunities for young people, particularly young Black women from marginalized backgrounds to gain the educational components and have resources.”
When Coquie Hughes saw The Wiz as a kid, she had no idea what it’d take to be the person on the other side of the screen who created it all. Now, her movies serve as a similar inspiration to a new generation of indie creators.
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