“When Cigarettes Taste Like Blood” is my undergrad capstone project, directorial debut, and 2024 Student Academy Awards Semifinalist short film. Inspired by Lukas Dhont’s “Close” (2022), it takes a still and subdued approach to display the fragility of inter-male affection within young adulthood and how the silent death of platonic male intimacy (fed by the fear of homoromanticism) destroys many male relationships across all sexualities and identities. The imagery pays homage to the metaphysical atmospheres of Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography and the paintings of Kerry James Marshall where I contrast black bodies and faces (on the verge of silhouette) against soft monochrome landscapes of the American South. The premise is dedicated to those who have suffered under the threats of masculine conformity, fraternal peer pressures, and expectations of manhood. Beneath the imagery, “When Cigarettes Taste Like Blood” represents the abruptness of abandonment and the conflicted desire for deeper male relationship, pulling from fading anecdotal memories of evanescent male friendships and straddling that blurry line between platonic affection and faint flickers of romance that perished due to fears of intimacy, sexual misunderstanding, and the oppression of external assumptions.”