Brothers and collaborators, Jamel and LaVonte Robinson create films that blur the line between documentary and art, merging layered imagery, original sound, and performance into a singular visual language. Their work moves between intimate process-driven storytelling and immersive, symbolic narratives. Jamel, a multidisciplinary artist, directs and composes the scores, while LaVonte's eye as cinematographer and editor shapes the rhythm, texture, and emotional weight of each piece. Together, they build cinematic experiences rooted in emotional honesty and experimentation films that explore identity, memory, grief, and transcendence while inviting viewers into spaces where personal history and collective memory converge.
"Punch-Drunk Love" (2022)
Punch-Drunk Love captures the visceral process of creating abstract paintings using boxing gloves dipped in paint — where the body, spirit, and act of creation collide. Directed by Jamel Robinson and shot by his brother and Director of Photography, LaVonte Robinson, the film reveals an intimate behind-the-scenes journey of punching through grief to reach breakthrough. Set to Robinson's original song, A Love Worth Fighting For, the film unfolds in a continuous "final round" shot, capturing the artist boxing his last works in the series to completion. The emotional and physical tensions explored here would become the foundation for Heaven Come Down, where movement, sound, and film converge in an expanded performance of the same themes.
SCREAM (2022)
SCREAM is a Harlem Royalty Studios film produced by Unseen Studio and directed by Jamel Robinson. Shot in Venice, Rome, and Berlin, the film follows a masked figure - Robinson himself, wearing Venetian masks throughout — navigating a world both hiding behind its own masks and forcing him to wear his. Rooted in Robinson's SCREAM painting series - born from a racially charged encounter at the World Trade Center Memorial involving two young brown children and their mother — the film brings that moment full circle, honoring their presence while expanding the work's meditation on identity, spirit, and survival. Draped in a white garment, a white suit, or nothing at all but a Venetian mask, the figure moves through each city in silence, embodying Robinson's idea of "walking with the Holy Spirit" - from darkness into light. Cinematography by La Vonte Robinson (Venice, Rome) and Walter Pinkney (Berlin) captures this tension, while Robinson's original piano score drives the emotional weight forward.
Heaven Come Down (2025)
Heaven Come Down is a short film shaped from footage of the live performance of the same name, staged at the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling during Jamel Robinson's solo exhibition A Love Worth Fighting For. The work builds on the emotional terrain of Robinson's Punch-Drunk Love series, where the body, spirit, and act of creation collide. Choreographed and performed by Jerron Herman, the performance unfolds before a silent projection of the Punch-Drunk Love film while Robinson performs his original score live. Herman's movements are layered with his own reflections on "why he creates," weaving sound, silence, and storytelling into a singular, immersive experience. Directed, edited, and sound-designed by LaVonte Robinson, the film captures more than documentation - it pulls viewers inside the energy of the piece, holding the tension, intimacy, and improvisation at the heart of Heaven Come Down.
Unkempt Promises (2024)
Directed by Jamel Robinson, Unkempt Promises unfolds in the open fields of Greenport Conservation Area in Hudson, New York, embodying the incarnate of an ancestral spirit summoned to reckon with America's unfulfilled promises and the generational grief surrounding the Black experience within it. Shot by Director of Photography LaVonte Robinson, the film draws from Robinson's assemblage practice incorporating materials from his sculptural work — most visibly in the mask adorned with nails and pennies worn by the central character, a direct reference to Nkondi figures in Kongo spiritual traditions. These ritual objects historically served as vessels of power, protection, and justice — a symbolism that threads through the film's exploration of retribution and memory. The masked character, dressed entirely in black, walks forward across the field — a gesture echoing Robinson's recurring motif of "walking with the Holy Spirit," reframed here as a movement alongside ancestral spirits seeking balance and truth. Through deliberate pacing, layered imagery, and a haunting thumb-piano score composed by Robinson, the film invokes tension and contemplation. Birdhouses, falling petals, and coins become symbols of presence and absence, weaving a quiet dialogue between the natural world, the ritual object, and the body in motion.