Detroit, Michigan · Kingston, Jamaica · Hollywood, California · Atlanta, Georgia
THE STORY
A Life Written in Survival
This is not a story that was planned. It was lived — through streets that demanded everything, through walls that were meant to hold him, through music that opened a door, and through a camera that finally gave him a voice. Born and Raised is the true account of one man's journey from the bottom of Detroit to the front of a film set.
01 — The Beginning
Detroit
"The city shaped him before he could shape himself."
Detroit doesn't let you be neutral. From an early age, choices were made — not always with full understanding of the weight they carried. The streets had a gravity of their own, and he was pulled in. Youth homes came first. Then prisons. A system that was designed to contain, not to build. But even inside those walls, a mind was working — calculating, observing, planning. The city tried to write his ending before his story had really begun.
02 — The Door
Music
"The industry gave him a stage. The streets still had his number."
A business mindset found its first real outlet in music. The industry opened a door that the streets had never offered — a world of creativity, commerce, and possibility. But the underworld doesn't release its grip easily. He found himself living between two identities: the artist building something legitimate, and the man still tangled in a life of crime. Music gave him purpose. It also gave him a reason to fight harder for a way out.
03 — The Anchor
Family
"When family arrived, everything he thought he knew was tested."
In the middle of the chaos, family came into his life. With it came a weight he hadn't carried before — not the weight of the streets, but the weight of responsibility, of love, of something worth protecting. He had thought for a long time that there was only one way forward. Family showed him he was wrong. But it also brought battles of its own: mentors who became obstacles, deaths that left marks, lies and deceit that tested every relationship he had built.
04 — The Turn
Faith
"He turned from crime completely. Not because it was easy — because it was necessary."
The decision to walk away from everything he had known was not made in a single moment. It was built over years of loss, of near misses, of watching what the life cost the people around him. With faith and determination — even when the stakes were life or death — he committed to a different path. Other businesses took a front seat. He built, he grinded, he pushed. And through it all, something from childhood kept pulling at him.
05 — The Calling
Film
"His uncle had shown him the camera as a kid. It never forgot him."
The film industry had been in his life long before he recognized it as a calling. His uncle had introduced him to it as a child — the magic of storytelling through a lens. That seed, planted early, survived everything. When music went to the back burner and the streets were finally behind him, the camera came back around. A career as an actor and filmmaker emerged — not from privilege or connections, but from survival, from story, from the raw material of a life fully lived. Friends turned to enemies. The road never got easy. But the story was finally being told on his terms.
Still Standing
Born and Raised is more than a film. It is a document of what it means to come from nothing, to be shaped by forces beyond your control, and to find — through faith, through family, through the power of storytelling — that you were never as trapped as the world wanted you to believe.
A BUP Productionz Film