"Venom"-star Riz Ahmed's blockbuster success is giving him a bigger platform to continue his call for more representation in Hollywood.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Prominent successes can mask structural problems.
00:03Obama was in the White House and you still needed the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:18We're talking about representation, not diversity.
00:21What's at stake here is whether or not we will move forwards together
00:25or whether we will leave people behind.
00:31The Black Lives Matter Movement
00:36When you first start seeing gay characters in mainstream culture
00:39or black characters or Muslim characters,
00:42they can start off as a kind of stereotype.
00:44The cab driver, the shopkeeper.
00:50There's a lot of kind of terrorist number three stuff.
00:52I just made a decision I wasn't going to do it.
00:54I just thought I'd rather be broke.
00:56The Black Lives Matter Movement
01:05The power of stories to allow us to relate to experiences
01:08that don't resemble our own is phenomenal.
01:18See there's thousands of angry young men that are lost,
01:20sidelined in the economy, a marginal cost.
01:23Now, if we fail to represent people in our mainstream narratives,
01:29they'll switch off.
01:30They'll retreat to fringe narratives, to filter bubbles online
01:33and sometimes even off to Syria.
01:35What people are looking for is the message that they belong,
01:40that they're part of something,
01:43that they are seen and heard and that despite
01:46or perhaps because of the uniqueness of their experience,
01:49they are valued.
01:50They want to feel represented.
01:53They want to be heard.