When Alex Woodruff was looking to direct his first short film, he originally wanted to set the story during the Stop Cop City movement – the social and environmental movement opposing the construction of the controversial Atlanta Public Safety Training Center in the South River Forest.
But that idea became a little unwieldy for a couple of reasons.
“One, it was so epic, and I had never directed before, so I was nervous about trying something like that,” Woodruff said. “Two, before I made that movie, I wanted people to understand my stake in what was going on with the Stop Cop City movement. Why do I care?”
So Woodruff decided to go a little more grounded for his first film, which would eventually serve as a precursor of sorts to the film about Cop City (that film, called “Woodwork,” is currently in post-production). In order to show people why he’s so invested in that activist movement, he came up with the idea to set his movie in the Thomasville Heights public housing project where his father grew up – just a stone’s throw away from the training center.
“Thomasville,” written and directed by Woodruff, tackles topics such as gentrification and displacement, Atlanta’s controversial Red Dog anti-drug police unit, and generational trauma. The action takes place almost entirely in a car as a young man named Thomas (Stephen Ruffin) attempts to reconcile with his ailing father Marc (Jay Jones) before it’s too late.
The film played at the 2025 BronzeLens Film Festival in Atlanta, and is playing as a part of BronzeLens’ Encore Series on Aug. 6 at 7 p.m. at Spelman College.
With “Thomasville,” Woodruff wanted to tackle the public housing project and its place within Atlanta’s history and greater cultural landscape, particularly what its legacy means for Atlanta’s Black population.
“The City of Atlanta continuously makes a deal with the devil and makes these bargains to enrich the city, but potentially disenfranchise the people who need support the most within the city,” he said. “Very often, we put our Black faces at the forefront. What we don’t do as often as we should is make sure that the Black people within this city, the people who have less, have the opportunity to climb up. It’s an irony that I want to explore within all my work.”
The crux of the film’s plot also stemmed from Woodruff’s own fears about losing his father, who was dealing with health issues at the time he was writing.
“I worried that there would come that time where he would be at the hospital, and I would have very little time to get there to see him and mend, maybe, some open wounds that we still have between each other,” he said.
Recently, the Atlanta hip hop group Goodie Mob came onto the film as executive producers. For Woodruff, the group already felt like producers of a kind – their song “Dirty South” closes out the film – so bringing them on officially felt right.
Khujo, one of the members of Goodie Mob, said he felt a real connection to the film. The specificity of the dialogue and the location – whether it be the car, or mentions of the card game Tonk – resonated with him.
“We jumped at that opportunity, just to be a part of something that in my opinion is kind of historical,” he said.
Those particulars were important to Woodruff. He made sure to mention things like Tonk, or Southpole (his favorite clothing brand as a kid), to try and paint a picture of what growing up in Atlanta felt like. He didn’t want to create a “fast food” version of the city, but rather something imbued with specificity – the type of specificity found in Goodie Mob’s music.
“That’s why Goodie Mob got to where [they] are. Because [they] made something very specific. And [their] hometown loved it so much that [other people] had to take notice,” Woodruff said.
Goodie Mob is part of a recent trend of Atlanta rappers who have begun to make their way into film. Recently, 2Chainz served as a producer on Christian Nolan Jones’ short film “Red Clay,” and T.I. executive produced and starred in the recent documentary “The Birth of Trap Music,” directed by Christopher Scholar. For Khujo, the step into film felt like a natural evolution.
“When you’re a creative person, you’re always looking for that next medium, you know what I’m saying?” he said. “To catapult you into a whole different atmosphere.”
Woodruff said that Black musical artists have been working within the realm of film for quite some time, whether it be Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video or Kanye West’s musical short film “Runaway.” But he thinks that when Donald Glover started the television show “Atlanta” – a critically acclaimed work about Atlanta that’s unapologetically hip-hop – that opened the floodgates and made more filmmakers believe in the merit these artists bring to the table.
“I think that now that we’re seeing more and more access, and more and more filmmakers realizing that hip hop artists have so much to give, these walls are breaking down,” Woodruff said. “Rappers are starting to really spread their wings on this.”
For Atlanta, the collision of music and film makes sense. Atlanta has long been known as a music capital, but its legacy with film production is much shorter. Georgia’s film tax credit brought in production from Hollywood, but it hasn’t necessarily cultivated a local industry with its own flavor. Woodruff thinks Atlanta’s cultural cachet as a music city can help.
“We haven’t really transcended being a production hotspot to being a creative film hotspot. I think that’s what I really want to be a part of, is trying to leverage what capital we do have, a la music, and parlaying that investment into film,” he said. “How do we take, as Black people in Atlanta, something we have that is prosperous, and leverage that investment to bring it into a new art form that has an ability to be just as prosperous – if not more?”
Audiences are used to seeing Atlanta on screen, but usually as a stand-in for somewhere else. You can name a plethora of great movies about New York City, Los Angeles, or Boston, but the Atlanta canon is much smaller. But the music coming out of Atlanta gets location specific. In his song “There I Go,” Gucci Mane calls out places like Summerhill and Thomasville, but that’s only just starting to happen in Atlanta’s films.
“That happens in music all the time because we have such a high density of hip hop superheroes in Atlanta, but we don’t have that density of filmmaking creatives in Atlanta on the world stage,” Woodruff said. “We have so many here, but they don’t get the world stage that our rappers do right now. But we’re gonna get there.”
Woodruff is in the process of looking for distribution for “Thomasville” and is working on a feature length version of the script. Tickets for the Aug. 6 screening can be bought on Spelman College’s website.
