Courtney Lindsay (proper) and his father Ben (left) are the topics of the brand new documentary Discovering Ben, in regards to the energy of household, grace, and redemption.
On Father’s Day at Fifth Ward’s DeLUXE Theater, the air reverberated with cheerful anticipation and the scent of popcorn as viewers members settled in to look at the premiere of Discovering Ben. Most Houstonians know Courtney Lindsay because the native chef and restaurateur behind vegan mainstay Mo’ Brunch and Brews, however that day, he settled in to look at the documentary he coproduced, the visible retelling of how he met his father for the primary time at age 40.
The journey started when beforehand unknown members of the family began showing on family tree and DNA sampling websites. Lindsay was raised by his mom and a stepfather. He says the connection with the person of the home “wasn’t the perfect.” As soon as Lindsay met his organic father, who labored down on the Houston Ship Channel, the connection took a while to develop.
He was apprehensive at first, fearing that assembly Ben face-to-face would end in disappointment and disillusionment at a time when he wished to give attention to his development and happiness. However final summer time, after some deep soul-searching, Lindsay known as his father. Ben was ecstatic. Within the movie, his voice cracks with profound emotion as he recounts the story of discovering that he had a son. The pair met for espresso, an expertise Lindsay describes as “magical, virtually non secular,” filling voids in his coronary heart he by no means realized had been there within the first place.
“It was such , optimistic reunion…a weak and breaking-down-of-walls kind of scenario,” Lindsay says. “I felt like we needed to inform this story.”
Each Courtney and his spouse, Chasitie Lindsay, who each majored in movie at Texas Southern College, initially supposed to deliver the touching story to viewers within the type of a YouTube sequence, however their shut buddy and filmmaker Nana Kojo Nkunim noticed its potential as a feature-length documentary. He joined the venture as a codirector alongside Chasitie, an endeavor that he calls a “no-brainer.” Little did he know, it will assist him by way of the grief he felt from his personal father’s passing three years prior.
“That was form of like a redemption for me, to assist my buddy inform the story, and likewise for our neighborhood,” Nkunim says. “As folks of coloration, we’re very conscious of the stigma that comes with Black males… In case you hear ‘deadbeat,’ more often than not folks affiliate that with a Black man, and that’s an issue, as a result of Black fathers are residence and elevating their youngsters and guiding them and exhibiting them a method to maneuver by way of life the identical method as [men of] different…ethnicities have.”
The three generations featured in Discovering Ben.
Nkunim was additionally the one who pitched the concept of incorporating places important to the Lindsays, together with an historical oak in Baldwin Park, with limbs so thick and heavy they curve downward onto the bottom. You’ll be able to nonetheless climb it and discover just a few spots to perch, when you’re sure-footed sufficient, however in the end this aged magnificence lives at gravity’s mercy. It’s on this elegant tangle and dignified pure knowledge that Discovering Ben finds its central metaphor, a dramatic picture that flows beneath a lovely story of fatherhood and serves as its thematic anchor.
“That tree may symbolize a lot when it comes to connecting the dots with your loved ones tree,” Chasitie says.
Because the reunion happened solely final yr, the filmmakers seized the chance to seize a few of the main milestones of Lindsay and Ben’s relationship in actual time. Chasitie used Lindsay’s journals from that interval to stipulate the movie’s narrative and the interview questions for Lindsay, Ben, and different topics.
“It simply felt pure, virtually like having a dialog…I used to be form of just like the glue that helped pull all of the items collectively,” Chasitie says. “I give [Kojo] credit score for visually bringing the aesthetic, the sure themes all through the movie [that] tie these items collectively visually.”
Ben, with a smile gracing his face in almost each body, is an effervescent presence all through the movie. He instantly embraces his newfound roles as father and grandfather to the Lindsays’ two sons, giving them items and money. A pivotal second in each the movie and their relationship happens when Lindsay, his sons, and Ben go to the barbershop collectively. That’s when Lindsay says he actually began seeing Ben as his father.
“I bought the perfect components of my mom and my father,” he says. “I bought the psychological toughness and power [from] my mother, after which I bought the tenderness and that sort, heat coronary heart and loving spirit from my dad.”
Discovering Ben premiered on Father’s Day 2025. Coproducer Courtney Lindsay and his father Ben did not watch it earlier than then.
Neither Lindsay nor Ben noticed the ultimate reduce till its premiere. Ben cried, together with a lot of the viewers. Chasitie says that “the love [was] simply [trickling] down from starting to finish.”
Discovering Ben premiered exactly once we wanted it. At its coronary heart, the documentary is about the form of grace we not often prolong each to others and to ourselves. The producers and administrators search to extol the virtues of redemption, of second probabilities, and, generally, of getting to attend for the correct folks to return into your life on the proper second. Lindsay and Ben’s ever-evolving bond gives hope at a time when the world usually feels overwhelmingly bleak. Future screenings are presently within the works, and the Lindsays hope to proceed making much more films.
“If [viewers] have an awesome relationship with their father or their guardian, it’s a feel-good story,” Lindsay says of his debut movie. “I feel that it adjustments the attitude on how folks love and the way folks maintain others accountable for being human. I feel a whole lot of occasions we put an excessive amount of on folks and neglect the truth that they’re human.”
