This spring, Aaron Johnson was filming a short documentary in Whidbey Island and Port Townsend. 

At the Port Townsend Film Festival, Johnson’s “Dark and Tender” is slated to screen during the PTFF forum on “Black Filmmakers and the Pacific Northwest.”

That kind of fast turnaround time is almost un-Hollywood. 

When asked what it felt like to have a completed film in August that he’d been making in April — The Leader wrote about its production for its April 10 issue — Johnson said, “It feels really efficient. I’m really impressed with our team.”

Johnson provided the film, “Dark and Tender,” to The Leader for review in its Sept. 4 issue. Although limited segments of “Dark and Tender” had received prior private screenings for roughly half a dozen funders at a time, Johnson confirmed that the Port Townsend Film Festival will provide the first full public screening of the complete film. It will be screened at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 20, in the Pope Marine Building in downtown Port Townsend, as part of the four-day film festival.

“I’m really excited to see other filmmakers and creative folks, who are telling stories with film and video,” Johnson said. “I’ve heard really good things about this particular film festival.”

Johnson majored in art and documentary film at California Institute of the Arts, the same school that produced fellow filmmakers Tim Burton and Brad Bird, but he spent several years as a professional photographer, branching into commercial videography for occasions such as weddings.

“I got pretty exposed to video and filmmaking as a service, but I always wanted to tell a story,” Johnson said.

Even so, when Johnson was initially exploring the idea of promoting platonic touch among Black men, film was not the first medium he considered, as he weighed options ranging from a book to an art installation, before he came to the conclusion that film would be most appropriate.

Johnson has worked on what would become “Dark and Tender” for nearly a decade, and one of the more significant challenges was persuading Black men to agree to being documented in the act of being tender with each other.

“A lot of it was emotional and trust building,” Johnson said. “The camera was almost like the fifth layer back of activity.”

Although Johnson has always aspired to make films, he acknowledged that the practical realities of his life, as well as the scheduling, financing and other complexities involved in producing films, have made it more feasible for him to pursue avenues such as installation and performance art, as well as other forms of expression “experimental enough that you wouldn’t call those video works formal documentary.”

Johnson’s director of photography on “Dark and Tender” is also his brother, Bryce, who shot a previous short documentary film about Aaron serving as the first African-American choir director for his state Future Farmers of America Honor Choir.

“Bryce told this really great story for his thesis, but we haven’t teamed up for a formal documentary until this,” Johnson said. “It was a real gift to be able to collaborate with my brother, who’s a really skillful storyteller.”

Johnson also touted the importance of having a Black man serve as director of photography for a film about Black men sharing their vulnerabilities.

The Port Townsend Film Festival is only the first step in the journey that Johnson sees “Dark and Tender” taking, since he anticipates the film will go on tour for the next six to eight months, and will be accompanied by workshops of Black men throughout the country, which will themselves be documented as a feature film that he expects to release by the end of next year.

“That feature film could become a documentary series,” Johnson said. “We had 11 hours of footage that we cut into a 17-minute short film. We thought it would be a big miss not to include the bigger picture of this conversation touring throughout the United States.”

In spite of his own efforts, Johnson asserted that images of Black men being tender, vulnerable and non-violent with each other, in a platonic way, remain precious precisely because they are still so rare.

“Even though this happens all over the United States, and is a part of our humanity, it’s not celebrated or not centered” in our media culture, Johnson said. “For every one image that you see of tender humanity between Black men, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of violence that are shown.”

Johnson believes it is imperative for our culture to counter the prevalence of portrayals of “the Black brute,” a “violent, aggressive, hyper-sexualized” stereotype, which he lamented is “the most invested image of the Black male in America today.”

Johnson believes that “anyone who reads this article, or watches my film,” could help promote an alternative that “we desperately need.”

Ultimately, Johnson regards images of Black men showing platonic physical affection as “sacred spaces that need to become normalized, so they can stop being sacred.”