The story of Kwabena – a young, black aspiring filmmaker – is told with unlimited creativity and craft in this web-series, self-produced by four film school friends.

Dreaming Whilst Black is a comedy of breadth and depth. It communicates the experiences of Kwabena, a young British Jamaican filmmaker chasing his dreams in London, through sensitively drawn characters living all of life in front of the camera. The 9-part series covers dating, balancing relationships with professional dreams, managing family expectations, the struggle to get opportunities in the film industry, and everyday and structural racism. All of which is grounded in Kwabena’s identity and experience as a Black man, and filtered through his hilarious, surreal, fantastical mind.

In the series, Kwabena is attempting to make his first short film and take that work to festivals. This is the route film students are told will get them opportunities. The show’s own backstory, however, is of four film school friends giving up on this route, coming together to form a collective and putting all their creative energy into this hugely ambitious project. Watching the series, what they achieved on such a small budget is astonishing, and nowhere is this more evident than in Episode 2, The Great British Race Off, where the film industry's structural inequalities of race, gender, and class are laid bare through the metaphor of an elaborate and hilariously unfair foot race.