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Director Mischa Webley always had big plans for Hasaan Hates Portland. Producing the semi-autobiographical story about, per its log line, “being Black in the whitest and weirdest city in America” as a series of web shorts was something of a compromise. Though, if you were living in Portland when the episodes rolled out in 2024, you probably know the online format didn’t hold the show back.
Millions watched the short, documentary-style episodes and followed along as the titular character, Hasaan (played by Hasaan Thomas), encountered a mess of well-meaning but wildly ignorant white people. There was a “reparations happy hour.” White canvassers collecting signatures for African children were dismayed that a Black man wouldn’t stop to help support their cause. Post-brunch, two white people offered Hasaan their leftovers, presuming for no apparent reason other than his skin color that he was unhoused.
In many ways, it was an update to Portlandia, but from a Black perspective.
Immediately, everyone wanted to know what was next for the show. Would it progress from web series to HBO show, in the line of Broad City, High Maintenance and Insecure? What about a Hollywood movie?
Webley tells WW that, while he fielded some calls about going in those directions, and even wrote a script for a big-budget feature film, he eventually realized a scrappy independent movie was the best way to grow the project.
“What I really wanted to do was make something on my own,” he says. Now he’s gathering most of the team that made the web series and self-producing a movie. In addition to “a retirement fund that I had,” Webley says a mix of grants, private donations and an ongoing Kickstarter campaign (which runs through Sept. 18) will supply the movie’s modest budget, which he says is in the low six figures. A 16-day shoot is planned to wrap in October, with postproduction running through the winter. Webley says he hopes to premiere the film in 2027.
While he was figuring out what to do after the web series took off, Webley says Richard Linklater’s 1990 movie Slacker turned out to be the key.
“Rewatching that film just reminded me—it gave me permission, in a way—that you can kind of do whatever you want,” Webley says, pointing out the film’s oddly meandering structure and large cast of characters who show up for single scenes and never return. He realized Hasaan Hates Portland could follow a similar model. “We’re painting a picture of Portland,” Webley says, “but it’s really the characters in it [that make] the world.”
Though the cast of more than 35 actors is still being locked down, Webley did confirm the rapper Wynne will make a cameo and teased a few bits, like a semi-corrupt city commissioner, a New Age psychic who’s involved with a hip-hop group, and stoner beat cops who aren’t super invested in enforcing the law.
Like Slacker, Webley’s new movie will take place over a single day. At the outset, Hasaan, now a single father with two grown kids, finds out he’s getting evicted. While he’s running around town trying to scrape together the cash to keep his house, neighbors form a protest in his yard. And so the familiar dynamic resurfaces: Strangers are forcing help onto someone who didn’t ask for it, presuming that help is wanted or at least needed.
“He’s suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a reluctant hero who accidentally becomes the face of a movement that he wishes would just leave him alone,” reads the pitch on the film’s Kickstarter.
Hasaan Hates Portland has always thrived on a mockumentary dynamic. Many of the bits are elaborations of situations Webley and Thomas encountered in real life around Portland. The fact that Thomas’ own daughter will play one of his kids in the movie blurs the line further. Reading through the synopsis raises the question: Did Thomas happen to get evicted and have a bunch of white people build a protest that he didn’t ask for in front of his house?
“Not exactly,” Webley says with a laugh, “but let’s say that his life has flirted with a lot of those same situations.”
