The screenplay for Martine Syms’s critically acclaimed debut film, The African Desperate (2022) featuring the artist Diamond Stingily. A coming-of-age tale from one of America’s most exciting young contemporary artists, the film follows Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in upstate New York, and ends at a Chicago Blue Line Station. With Syms’s celebrated conceptual grit, humour, social commentary, and vivid visual language, The African Desperate is an acerbically funny, satirical take on art schools and the students that populate them including appearances from gallerist Bridget Donahue, Ruby McCollister and Brent David Freaney.