Kevin Durant, Mike Conley win Oscar for short film 'Two Distant Strangers'

“From the minute we saw the script for this project, we knew it had the potential to be very powerful and we wanted to be involved,” Durant told Slam Magazine in February. “Getting to see it come to life on the screen was an intense experience – I also had the opportunity to screen it for my teammates and coaches at the Nets, and I think everyone came away with the same feeling that I did that the film is telling a really important story about the Black experience, but in a way that is real and raw and not at all preachy.”

“I think that’s huge to kind of show that visually for the general public and people to [help them] understand what my uncles and my grandparents taught me, like sometimes when you get pulled over you just pray, man,” Conley told Slam Magazine in February. “There’s nothing you can do sometimes [but] just pray that everything comes out right like you can show your identity you can do everything you want to do in the right manner and still get shot or have something come out of that.

“So it’s just, it was a great way of portraying it and allowing I think all of us to kind of exhale a little bit that we have this film to be able to show all those examples.”