4 DARNELL MARTIN

Most people wouldn't describe 170th Street and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx as a place where the light has its own beautiful quality. But 30ish writer-director Darnell Martin has a knack for finding poetry in unlikely places. After I Like It Like That, her seriocomic chronicle of a young mother's coming-of-age, premiered to unanimous praise at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Columbia began promoting the film as the first major studio feature to be directed by an African-American woman. That's a distinction Martin, a Sarah Lawrence grad who got her start as an assistant cameraman on music videos, dislikes for its patronizing undertone; she's a filmmaker-period-and indeed battled the studio to keep her debut's highly charged moments intact. ''They wanted to cut all these scenes and turn it into a romantic comedy,'' she explains. What audiences got instead was something they don't often see in Bronx tales about ''people in desperate situations, people who have got a chunk of their humanity missing.'' The new ingredient? ''I think it's hope.''