The pitch

All Leon wants is a full tank, some gummy worms, and a cold drink. Instead, he gets a zombie outbreak, and a very good reason to keep his gun loaded.

TYRANT is a zombie western set over one night at a gas station in Eastern North Carolina. We're raising $3,235 to shoot it in three nights with a paid cast and crew, and to bring it to festival audiences.

The story

Leon Rutger is a bodyguard from East Texas, out of a job as of six o'clock. His six-year-old daughter, Amara, is waiting at a motel twenty miles away.

He coasts into FLAMENCO Gas & Grocery after hours, where Jiyang, his wife Kelli and their kids, Cassie and Sean, have been living in the stockroom for days. The radio says the sickness everyone calls the Drift only hits "high-risk communities."

Then the dead walk out of the soybean fields. Leon does what Leon does, and from behind the glass the Kims watch a man in a cowboy hat shoot someone twice. Now they're locked in together until sunrise, with a family that has decided Leon is the danger, a man who can't afford to wait, and a sickness that's already inside the store.

Why I'm making this

TYRANT is about two communities in the South that share streets, money and fear. Asian American families are often given the chance to open businesses in Black neighborhoods, depend on Black customers to keep them open, and still too often can treat those customers as threats.

The bulletproof cage around the register is the film's central image. It protects one family, and it tells another exactly how it is seen.

The Drift is built on how this country handled AIDS in the 1980s and '90s. A sickness that officials believed only touched people they didn't care about was easy to call those people's own fault, until it reached everyone. In the early '80s, the groups named as highest risk got a nickname, the "Four-H Club": homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs and Haitians.

Leon's grandmother was Haitian, and the film's dead come from Haitian lore, where a zonbi isn't a monster but a person someone else controls. The only monsters in TYRANT are outside the glass. Everyone inside is trying to protect a child, and the glass between them was put up by fear long before this night.

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Meet the Crew

Khymell "Khy" Chapman is a writer and director based in North Carolina, and a senior film student at East Carolina University. He works across documentary and narrative fiction. He programs films for the RiverRun International Film Festival, has pitched at RiverRun's Pitch Fest, has worked with an Emmy-winning director since 2023, and has distributed films to PBS and Black Public Media.

We'll introduce the cast and crew here as they sign on.

Jakeyia Dunn

Jakeyia Dunn is a senior-level film student with a sustained academic and creative focus on documentary filmmaking. Her interest in nonfiction cinema developed early and has informed both her scholarly and practical work in film studies. At the age of 17, she began producing short documentary films, including For Thy Lord, My Soul to Keep and So Melodious.

Christian Jimenez-Maldonado

Christian Jimenez-Maldonado is a first-generation college graduate from Asheville, North Carolina , with a B.A. in Film Studies and a minor in Journalism. A filmmaker, photographer, and editor, Christian studied Lucha Libre culture in Mexico City through the Wentworth Fellowship. His production experience includes Survivor UNCW and Discovery Channel’s Moonshiners: Master Distiller.

Zavian Watford

Zavian Watford is an emerging filmmaker, writer, and visual storyteller currently completing his undergraduate at East Carolina University, pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an Emphasis in Film and Video Production. His artistic practice centers on storytelling through film and video, with a particular focus on writing, character development, and narrative construction. His work is also informed by photography, drawing, and printmaking, which have strengthened his understanding of composition, lighting, and visual storytelling. As he completes his undergraduate education, Zavian is focused on developing his voice as a filmmaker and preparing for a professional career in film and media. His atmosphere can create meaningful connections with audiences. Following graduation, he hopes to continue writing and directing original work while sharing his films through festivals, independent distribution, and other professional opportunities.

 John Gibbs 

John Gibbs is an undergraduate Film and Video Production student at East Carolina University, aiming to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in the major. He is a lover of cars, motorcycles, documentary films, and short narrative works of art. Currently, Gibbs is more invested in the study of cinema as a tool for storytelling about identities, communities, and personal experiences and the meaning of the people and cultures surrounding them. In his pieces, he tries to combine his interest in the media and cinematography to focus on real-life issues. In addition, he has featured heavily in his works, Kick Stand Up and other narrative productions, topics such as belonging, otherness, and self-identity, and the empowerment of motorcycle culture and its community. As such, the young producer is working on perfecting his editing, directing, producing, and cinematography skills to prepare for his senior thesis and the start of his professional filmmaking and video production career. Gibbs wants to continue investing in creative work that is close to him and use it to create a unique space for the communities and the subjects that inspire him to make a difference in the world.