Filmmaker & Author Carona Davis-Diop: Triumph After Tragedy
Lebanon, New Jersey – Looking back at her life Carona Davis-Diop can honestly say that, everything she has endured, good or bad, has brought her to where she is today. What’s more interesting is that Carona feels fulfilled in the work that she does and her work means more to her than wealth. In her eyes her work, as well as the individuals that Carona is lucky enough to have to surround her, is wealth.
On November 6, 1999 at 9:07 and 9:15 in the morning Carona Davis-Diop gave birth to two beautiful baby girls who passed away soon after due to pre-term labor. That’s where everything she believed in and considered of value for her began to shift. She was angry the lives were taken from her.
She screamed, cried, and even broke glass all advised by her beautiful mother who told Carona that she had every right to feel the way she did and to not allow it to consume her.
She had things bottled up inside of her even before the twins. In addition to being in a very abusive relationship at the time, she almost lost her mother to two brain aneurysms. That lead to her caring for her siblings as well as her own two children. It all came pouring out in a fit of rage and emotional downpour. Afterward, she felt clean, like a weight was lifted from around her neck.
Clarity. Yes, clarity would be a more fitting word to use. Since then, Carona understands herself more, she speaks to herself more. Also she is more kind to herself, even more, patient and forgiving. She is still here. It still amazes her to this day.
In 2016 after residing in New Jersey for only a year Carona was really struggling emotionally because in all of her 43 years she had never been so far away from her mother and siblings who were still residing in Georgia, where she grew up. She had the infamous ‘get your stuff together!’ talk with herself and when that happens she automatically shifts into ‘what’s next’ mode.
Carona was working and finishing a book that she started some years before and decided that working wasn’t enough. She felt hungry for more. She wanted to start her own business, so she opened up a fashion boutique in Frenchtown NJ. In 2 years Carona was still very unhappy even with having her own business.
She put her finished book “The Opening” with a matching poster in the boutique window and customers began asking for copies of the book. On one particular afternoon a man walked into the store and asked Carona if she knew where the movie that was on the poster in my window was showing. Looking at him puzzled then remembering that her book poster did resemble a movie poster Carona laughed and told him it was a book poster. He was the first but not the last to tell her that her book should be a movie.
She laughed it off until a fifth and sixth customer would share the same views as the first. She then put an ad up for actors, closed her store for a day clearing the floor for a stage, and held auditions for the book in her boutique. The customer is always right. now has new meaning to her.
The book “The Opening” by Carona Davis-Diop is available online Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kindle. The movie is soon to be released. Check out the trailer.
Plot: Denee Brathwaite longs for the attention of her estranged father, Dr. Christopher Brathwaite but, after his mysteriously, gruesome, death, her life begins to spiral out of control sending. Denee tail spinning into the supernatural world of demons and jinn. She will need to find her father’s killer and her true identity before it is too late.
For more information, visit www.diopproductions.com/