Philadelphia Weekly

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Everybody knows the love-hate relationships mothers and daughters endure. But Manayunk family therapist Jody Miller says things get especially dicey between mothers and their only daughters. 


“That’s where you’ll see the real dynamics,” says Miller. “They tend to get into very competitive situations, and there are almost always periods when the daughter’s coming of age, especially if she’s successful or has the potential for success, where the mother will feel very threatened.”


This makes me wonder how bestselling Mt. Airy urban lit novelist Karen Quinones Miller has managed to refrain from strangling her vivacious and talented daughter Camille. 


I’m kidding, of course, since 22-year-old Camille Quinones Miller, who stands 5-feet-nothing and weighs maybe 100 pounds, is so cute it’s hard to imagine anyone assaulting her with anything but a hug. But she’s also an ambitious fledgling movie director who’s likely headed for big things. Yet Camille and Karen get along so swimmingly, you’d think they were a pair of mallards on a glassy lake. “It’s always been me and her against the world,” shrugs Karen, an ex- Inquirer reporter, when asked to explain the tranquility. “Always me and her,” agrees Camille. “Best friends.”


Camille thinks enough of her best friend that four months after graduating from Clark Atlanta University with a degree in film, she’s made good on a decade-old promise by putting Karen’s 2004 novel Ida B. on the big screen. 


“When Camille was 12, she told me I should start writing books so one day she could turn one into a movie,” recalls Karen, now working on her seventh, An Angry-Assed Black Woman . “That’s how my literary career began. Now she’s made one of my dreams come true. How awesome is that?”



Camille’s maiden film, Uptown Dreams ,
is a no-budget indie chronicling day-to-day life inside a high-rise housing project at 128th and Lexington in Harlem, N.Y. It debuted Oct. 16 at the Inquirer Building for about 100 members of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and, uh, me. Now, I’m not going to tell you Uptown Dreams is the best movie I’ve ever seen, or anything like that. To be honest, I thought a couple of the scenes dragged on a bit, and several members of the likeable, nonpaid cast need to discover finesse. But it’s an honest, enthusiastic effort. And I find the film’s subject matter compelling, since I used to be intrigued by the foreboding, stark appearances of long-ago imploded project towers like North Philly’s crime- and drug-ridden Raymond Rosen Homes.


Karen, a Harlem native who acts in Uptown Dreams and serves as its executive producer, also warms to the subject of housing projects, but for a better reason: she grew up in one. Moreover, she thinks projects get a bad rap, especially in Philadelphia. 


“Here more so than in New York, there’s really a stigma attached to living in the projects, and I didn’t realize that until I moved out of New York,” she says. “I found project living kind of comforting because it’s a community within the community. I’m not denying the bad things that go on there. But in the projects, it was like you had 350 mothers.” 


Multitudinous moms couldn’t keep Karen, now 51, out of teenage trouble, however. She quit school at 13, and while she won’t disclose the specifics of her run-ins with authority (other than to maintain she never sold drugs), she admits to being “on a first-name basis with a lot of police officers.” 


At the urging of a cop, she joined the Navy in 1980, got out in ’85 and moved to Philly in ’87—the year Camille was born—to be closer to her brother, a sailor stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Karen took a secretarial position at the Daily News before catching the journalism bug, graduating from Temple and landing a job at the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot . The Inquirer hired her in 1994, where she stayed for six years. 


In those days, little Camille was a regular presence in the newsroom, although she quickly decided print journalism wasn’t her thing. “I wanted to tell stories without writing,” she says. “I couldn’t stand writing, so I used to wander over to the photojournalism department and hang out with those guys.” 


During her teens, Camille bought her first camera, did freelance newspaper photography and enrolled at Scribe Video Center, a West Philly nonprofit that trains aspiring videographers. She then headed south for college, where she met Spike Lee when he visited Clark Atlanta to screen his 2006 documentary When the 
Levees Broke . Camille told Lee he was her favorite filmmaker, and that she aspired to make powerful movies, too. 


“I asked him whether he thought I should go to NYU or UCLA for grad school,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Look, if you want to direct films, you should just go ahead and do your first one. Why waste the money on grad school?’ 


“I said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’”


Camille plans to show Uptown Dreams (uptown
dreamsmovie.com) at Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival in January. She hopes a national distributor will pick it up, and that her virgin film will, as they say in the street, blow up. But even if it doesn’t, the young director has at least one adoring fan.

“You always want your kids to do better than you, and I can already see Camille’s going to,” Karen says without a trace of envy. “I couldn’t be more delighted.” ■