Baltimore rapper Tashera Savage's biopic explores trauma, violence, survival

Baltimore rapper Tashera Savage has finished filming Thru the Eyes of a Hustler’s Daughter, a biopic shot across Baltimore City that roots her personal history in the neighborhoods and institutions that shaped it. The project centers on Savage’s own life, including the childhood trauma, violence and mental health strain she says came with growing up around drug dealing and street life.

Savage serves as executive producer on the film, which was shot in her childhood neighborhood and at Brockbridge Correctional Facility in Jessup, where her father spent years of his life. The prison, located at 7930 Brock Bridge Road in Anne Arundel County, opened in 1966 and closed in 2019. That choice of locations gives the movie a Baltimore footprint that reaches beyond a standard celebrity biopic and into the places where the city’s pain, memory and identity still overlap.

Savage has said the story is true and that she wants viewers to understand the mental-health toll of the life she lived, not just the spectacle of crime. She has also said she witnessed her father’s shooting death when she was 16, and that her parents were both heavily involved in the streets as she grew up in Edmondson Village. In interviews, she has said she does not want the project dismissed as just another “hood movie,” because the point is the emotional damage that can echo through families for generations.

The film’s drama is reinforced by a family history Baltimore viewers may already recognize. Savage previously appeared in BET and Paramount+’s American Gangster: Trap Queens, and a 2022 episode about her mother, Shontel Greene, traced how Greene’s own mother’s opioid addiction helped push her from a straight-A student with medical-school dreams into the drug trade. IMDb lists Shontel Greene Productions as the production company and Andrena Hale as director, and describes the film as the story of a teenager raised by drug-dealing parents who battles trauma and mental illness and finds her voice through poetry and music.

Savage has not announced a release date, but she has said she hopes the film will debut by the end of the year. For Baltimore, the finished production matters because it places a local artist’s survival story at the center of a broader conversation about trauma, addiction and the city’s creative economy, where art often becomes one of the few tools for naming harm and imagining repair.