Dear friends and colleagues, I’ve been watching about six hundred acting demo reels a day this week. Each one gets my absolute, undivided attention while it plays. A stranger’s demo reel, after all, represents a life, a dream, two parents and a childhood of hopes. You have to care. If you don’t care, why are you in the arena? We’re making our second feature film here at Askari. It’s our first one since I was injured. In a way it’s a triumph just to get to this point. There’s no recovery, exactly, but there’s definitely such thing as being as stubborn as hell. I’m crawling toward the sun with a knife between my teeth. AFTER AFTER is an American ensemble comedy about young people coming into their own in the tradition of THE BIG CHILL and METROPOLITAN. We wrote it over almost a year with the goal of capturing beauty, friendship through a heartfelt zillennial lens before this moment in history passes. We are pouring our own time, labor, and money into this film, and shooting in our own home, too. Still, three weeks’ pay for a full cast and crew is outside the realm of personal household finance. To that end, we are fundraising through Seed & Spark to finance the gap, and I hope you’ll consider joining in. The film is budgeted. The plan is clear. If we can raise at least $50,382 by August 10, 2026, we have a go picture and we’ll shoot in September. There are a number of backer rewards available, including an extremely rare opportunity to get your own bespoke Cairo Smith short story, but ultimately I hope that you will support this project because you believe in what I do and you believe in a better aesthetic regime for American art. Even just a follow on Seed & Spark gets us closer to qualifying for generous post-production grants, so please click through and follow the campaign. This is the biggest and most ambitious artistic undertaking we’ve ever embarked on, and I really do appreciate your exceptional support. I think we can do this. Link below. All my best, Cairo