Rating: 4.5/5
Stage play adapted to a film about Black lives ensnared in the history of white colonization. The film still occupies the stage but is lit to isolate the space into an infinite black, with characters sitting together, holding space, and telling their stories
The contradiction of raising a confident child who must also avoid being read as such in public — how to make a child feel loved who isn’t loved by the world around them
We raised you not to look down, not to avert your eye
The impossibility of defending yourself when every statement or gesture is assumed hostile or uneducated — the language around white violence (a lone wolf, a damaged young boy, a vulnerable son) vs that of black existence
I called him 'sir', not raising my voice or hand... his voice rising, I did not rise to it... I did not make a mistake
Peaceful protest or violent uprising, history quartered and replayed through the game of respectability politics as the sole means of liberation from white supremacy
This isn't working, is it?
The film is a dialectic — synthesizing the contradictions to arrive at new ones, but not arriving at a solution, instead living in the fact of lived experience
While the film does not manage to transcend its stage origins, I would not have seen it otherwise. The conversations are not new, but the presentation is all its own