Interview with Filmmaker Andrew Hawkins (MASQUERADE)

MASQUERADE was the winner of BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY at the August 2018 LGBT FEEDBACK Film Festival.

Matthew Toffolo: What motivated you to make this film?

Andrew Hawkins: I was inspired by the true story of the slave couple William and Ellen Craft who escaped in the same fashion. Ellen was light-skinned and posed as a sickly white male, while her husband posed as her slave servant. They miraculously made it to Boston and eventually had to flee to London while slave catchers came after them and threatened their safety in the North. So I wove their story in with a fictional story of a homosexual man living in a time when the word “homosexual” didn’t even exist. As a gay man from Virginia who struggled on a personal level to come out in the 2010s, I was fascinated with the history of gay people in early America. There are only a…