More than ten years before Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Police Department, Carmen Coustaut was in the midst of writing, producing directing, and editing her first film as a student in cinema production at the University of Southern California. Titled justifiable Homicide, the five-minute drama depicts police brutality in the African American community. It was inspired by her former students at Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles, who were continually under suspicion by LA police. Now an Assistant Professor of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Maryland-College Park, Coustaut is still concerned with young African Americans. Her second film, Extra Change, addresses the consequences of peer pressure and low self-esteem on a twelve-year-old girl. It won the National Educational Film and Video Festival's Silver Apple Award in 1988, as well as nine additional prizes. As an African American woman, Coustaut is a pioneer in her chosen profession, which places additional demands on her time. Though filmmaking is her primary objective, Coustaut is also intent on spreading the word about other African American women filmmakers. In 1988 she received a Rockefeller Scholarship that allowed her to interview thirty black women filmmakers for a book that she soon hopes to have published. She was also one of the first educators in the country to offer a course on black women filmmakers. The following interview reflects the ways Coustaut continually weaves her roles as filmmaker, teacher, and scholar together, allowing one to influence the other. It took place at the University of Vermont, where she spent a semester as Artist-in-Residence and was hard at work on her third film, a full-length feature titled Harmonica Man. I began by asking about her decision to become a filmmaker. Coustaut: In college I was interested in writing poetry, but I didn't do very much of it. In graduate school I studied literature, even though I have a Master's in Education. And from there, I started teaching high school English in Los Angeles. I wanted to call myself a writer, but I never did any writing except for a couple of stories here and there. While I was teaching, I was amazed at how influenced my students were by popular media--television and film, in particular. My interest in writing shifted to screenwriting and I took a couple of courses. That was a pivotal time, because I wanted to move East and I wanted to teach at a black college. And of course I still wanted to be a writer. I accepted a job teaching English at Howard, but after a while the chair of the English department said I had to get a Ph.D. in English to continue teaching. I had no undergraduate or graduate degree English and so I thought about taking a couple of courses, but I hated doing literary criticism. I loved teaching Afro-American literature, but I didn't want to focus on analyzing the works. I wanted to create my own work. So I said to myself, if I'm going to go back to school I have to go back and study what I want to study. I had been thinking about film school and that's what I decided to do. After teaching high school for four years and college for two and a half, I went back to California to attend film school at the University of Southern California with basically no idea of what I was getting into. I was thirty years old. It was time for me to really do something to direct my life. I always saw teaching as a way to make a contribution to the black community. But film is a way to make another kind of contribution to the black community, and I would also get some personal satisfaction out of expressing my own creativity. Ferreira: Who instilled within you the importance of making a contribution to the black community, and why do you still think that's important? Coustaut: I was in college in the late sixties at the height of the Black Power Movement. It was always a given that we would have to use our resources to give back to the community. …