Black and white does something to a face. It removes the distraction of color and leaves only what a person cannot hide — the set of a jaw, the wet shine of an eye, the way light falls across a forehead that has stopped pretending to be calm. David Fortune builds his first feature out of exactly this kind of looking. A man sits in an Atlanta kitchen, and the camera holds on him long enough that you begin to read his face the way his son reads it: for weather, for whether today is going to be a good day.

Color Book is a quiet drama about a single father and his eleven-year-old son, and it earns the word quiet honestly. Lucky (William Catlett) has just lost his wife, Tammy (Brandee Evans), and is left to raise Mason (Jeremiah Daniels), a boy with Down syndrome, on his own. The film gives itself one modest engine: the two of them set out across Metro Atlanta to get to a baseball game, the ordinary outing the family had been promising itself. That is essentially the whole plot. Everything else is observation — what a bus ride looks like, how a father teaches a boy to knot a tie, the small negotiations of a city that was not built with either of them in mind.

The decision to shoot in black and white could have been a pose. It is not. Fortune and his cinematographer, Nikolaus Summerer, use it as a discipline against pity. Color film makes a Southern summer look warm and a grieving man look soft; monochrome refuses both, and what is left is structure — the geometry of a MARTA platform, the grid of a chain-link fence, sunlight broken into hard bands across a living-room floor. The grayscale also flattens the easy markers of place and class into something closer to portraiture, so that a face and a doorway carry equal weight in the frame.

Atlanta is shot not as a postcard but as a working city, full of overpasses and waiting rooms and the particular light of a place that is already humid by ten in the morning. The city becomes the second lead, and the day-long journey across it gives the film the shape of a small odyssey. Each leg of the trip introduces a new texture — a barbershop, a stranger’s car, a stretch of sidewalk — and Fortune lingers on each one long enough that the ordinary starts to feel observed rather than staged.

The film’s most consequential choice is in front of the camera. Jeremiah Daniels, who has Down syndrome, plays a character who has Down syndrome — a sentence that should be unremarkable and still is not in American film, where such roles have usually gone to performers without the disability. Daniels is not asked to be a symbol or a lesson. He is asked to be Mason: stubborn, funny, frightened of the right things, fixated on his crayons and his coloring book, fully a child rather than a vehicle for someone else’s uplift. The performance has the unforced quality of someone who is not acting around his character but simply being inside it.

Catlett meets him without a trace of performance about patience. His Lucky is a man improvising a kind of parenting no one prepared him for — reading instructions in real time, getting things wrong, adjusting, swallowing his own grief because the morning still has to happen. Much of the film’s feeling lives in the gap between what Lucky says and what his face is doing, and Catlett plays that gap with a restraint that never tips into stoicism. He is tired in the specific way of a person carrying two jobs at once: keeping a household running and keeping a wound from showing.

The coloring book of the title is the boy’s, and it is also the film’s quiet argument. A coloring book is a set of lines somebody else drew, and a promise that staying inside them is the point. Mason colors the way he wants to. Fortune lets that small rebellion stand for everything the film is too careful to state out loud — that a life shaped by other people’s expectations, about disability, about Black fatherhood, about how a man is allowed to grieve, does not have to stay inside the lines, even when staying inside them would be easier. Tammy is present mostly as absence: a few photographs, the shape of a routine that now has a hole in it. The film resists every chance to turn that absence into a monologue.

Most films about disability arrive pre-loaded with their own reception. The score swells, the lesson lands, the audience is told exactly how to feel. Color Book withholds that machinery almost completely. There is no villain, no diagnosis scene, no third-act collapse that resolves into wisdom. The drama is entirely in the texture of an ordinary day going slightly wrong and then slightly right — a missed connection, a kindness from a stranger, a tantrum on a sidewalk that has nowhere to resolve except in being waited out. By refusing the usual emotional cues, Fortune asks the viewer to do the work of attention, which is the same work Lucky is doing: looking closely enough to understand a person who does not always communicate the way the world expects.

The sound design works the same restraint. There is little score, and long stretches lean on the ambient grain of the city — a train, a screen door, the flat acoustics of a half-empty room. Silence is allowed to sit. When music does arrive it is sparing enough to register as a choice rather than a cushion, and the effect is to keep the viewer alert instead of guided.

The film sits in a specific American tradition — Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, David Gordon Green’s George Washington, the early work of Barry Jenkins — where Black Southern life is filmed with patience and without sociology. It also belongs to Atlanta, now the working capital of Black American filmmaking, and it carries the marks of how it was made. Fortune financed the feature with a one-million-dollar AT&T Untold Stories grant won at the Tribeca Film Festival, then ran it through more than twenty festivals, gathering jury and audience prizes from Austin to Chicago to Denver before a major platform came calling. The path from a grant pitch to the largest streaming shelf in the world is itself a small argument about how an uncompromising independent film can now reach an audience.

Which leaves the question the film opens and refuses to close. A baseball game is an afternoon. It is not a cure for grief, and it does not answer what happens to a boy like Mason when his father is no longer there to read his face. Fortune does not pretend otherwise. The last stretch of the film offers tenderness without resolution — a day got through, not a wound healed — and trusts the viewer to sit with the difference rather than be talked out of it.

Color Book runs about 115 minutes and premieres on Netflix on 19 June 2026, after a festival run that began at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2024. David Fortune writes and directs his debut feature; the cast includes William Catlett, Jeremiah Daniels, Brandee Evans, Terri J. Vaughn and Lynne Ashe.