Time Loops and Time Loops

Groundhog Day for a Black Man was posted on YouTube and Facebook in 2016 and received a positive reception, eventually winning an award at the NBC Short Film Festival the following year. But it found new life in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and subsequent nationwide protests, when the viral video factory NowThis News asked permission to repost the film on their social channels. By then, stories about time loops seemed to be having a cultural resurgence, from the 2019 show Russian Doll to the 2020 movie Palm Springs.

But Free hadn’t seen it, he wrote last week in a Washington Post opinion piece, when he began writing his own film a few months later. (Free declined to be interviewed for this article; his co-director, Martin Desmond Roe, did not respond to requests for comment.) By his own account, Two Distant Strangers was inspired by a traumatic incident in his own life, when police entered his home with guns drawn and made him kneel on the floor, not realizing they had the wrong address.

Who Suggested That An Oscar-Winning Short Film Copied The Idea From Her 2016 Film?

A director suggested an Oscar-winning short film copied the idea from her 2016 film. Cynthia Kao made a viral TikTok showing how she thinks Two Distant Strangers was similar to her short film Groundhog Day for a Black Man. She pointed out how her film was shared with NowThis and how the news outlet was a co-producer on the award-winning short.

In a TikTok posted by director Cynthia Kao, the director talked about her four-minute short film titled Groundhog Day for a Black Man, released in December 2016, in which a Black man relives the same day and tries to survive a police interaction, Kao said. We had recently seen your short film titled Groundhog Day for a Black Man and found it very powerful, the email read, as seen in Kao’s TikTok. We would of course credit you on screen and give full credit to the production team listed in the YouTube description in the credits at the end of the video, the email continued.

Kao’s TikTok garnered 2.8 million views, prompting her supporters to demand Kao be credited if her work inspired Two Distant Strangers and calls for further explanation from NowThis for its role in co-producing the Oscar-winning short. In a statement to The Daily Beast, NowThis said: Two Distant Strangers was independently conceived and in final production for months before NowThis became involved in the film so any connection is out of the question. It’s unfortunate that the repeated nature of these experiences are a reality for Black Americans.

But they sent our directors an email, asking if they could share the short, which they did. On Wednesday, a representative for the filmmakers for Two Distant Strangers pointed Insider to an op-ed written by filmmaker Travon Free published by The Washington Post addressing the controversy. In the Wednesday op-ed, titled Opinion: Police killings of Black people are ‘Groundhog Day’ in America.

This claim is baseless, Free wrote in the op-ed. NowThis did not join our project until after filming was complete and had no creative influence on the project. He added that the using the story device of a time loop, especially in the context of a Black man’s death by a police officer, is not new, mentioning other works such as the feature film The Obituary of Tunde Johnson, an episode of The Twilight Zone called Replay, and a 2015 essay titled About Images of Black Death and the Groundhog Day of Police Brutality.

What Is The Name Of The Short Film About A Black Man Who Is Killed In A Police Interaction With A White Officer?

Still from Groundhog Day for a Black Man Last week was the 2021 Academy Awards. Two Distant Strangers is a film about a black man who is killed in a police interaction with a white officer and is forced to repeat that day, each time trying different tactics and approaches to avoid what is seemingly an inevitable outcome. Director Cynthia Kao took to social media highlight similarities between Two Distant Strangers and her 2016 short film Groundhog Day for a Black Man.

To make matters more complicated, in the summer of 2020, amidst the Black Lives Matter protests, the news organization NowThis approached Koa about amplifying her film. They posted the video to their Facebook and Twitter pages and helped draw a great deal of attention to Groundhog Day for a Black Man. However, NowThis is listed in the credits of Two Distant Strangers as someone the film was “In association with.”

Still, it’s an amazing coincidence. Two films with such similar concepts both having involvement from NowThis. Two Films with Similar Premise, but Different Executions The two films start with a very similar premise, using the “Groundhog Day” trope to examine the issue of police violence toward black people.

However, the biggest difference between the two films is the tone. Though both are dealing with an extremely serious issue, Groundhog Day for a Black Man is more comedic in nature, with the protagonist trying increasingly wacky things to avoid being killed. However, as the title to Kao’s film makes clear, that is a commonly used trope known as the Groundhog Day Loop.

But even if it is a work of plagiarism, it’s likely not one that much can be done about. Copyright doesn’t extend to ideas and concepts and the two works are very different outside of their broad concept. Bottom Line If we accept that NowThis is telling the truth that they only became involved with Two Distant Strangers very late in the process, then it’s possible and even probable that the film was developed without awareness of Groundhog Day for a Black Man.

Even if it isn’t a great plagiarism story, it is a great examination of how creativity works and about filmmaking as a genre.