Haile Gerima, the legendary Ethiopian director behind Sankofa and Ashes and Embers, made two feature films before graduating from UCLA in 1976: Bush Mama, his thesis, and Harvest: 3,000 Years. Forty years later, his son, Merawi Gerima, found himself in film school at USC, with the same dreams of finishing a feature before exiting into the real world.
“None of his teachers knew how he did it,” Gerima said of his father. “He shot two films before he had to give the camera back, edited the thesis by day, and then Harvest by night.” For Gerima, whose mother is the award-winning director Shirikiana Aina, completing a film before graduating was an urgent, deeply rooted goal. “It was my own personal kind of challenge,” he said.
He rose to the challenge by writing and directing his debut feature, Residue. It’s a frank look at Gerima’s hometown, Washington, D.C., and the rate at which gentrification has transformed the city. The meta-tale follows Jay (magnetic newcomer Obinna Nwachukwu), a D.C.–born filmmaker who returns after finishing college in L.A. to make a movie about his childhood. He’s shocked by how much the city has changed, and is troubled by longtime local friends who have up and vanished. The narrative mimics Gerima’s own experience with leaving D.C. for a year, then returning in 2016 to a place that had shape-shifted.
“It was too much for my system to take,” he said. “I was going down this dark path of pure anger with no outlet. The powerlessness was overwhelming, so I started writing [Residue] as a way to find something to grab onto that could make me feel like I had a way to affect the fate of my community.”
Residue is unflinching in its portrayal of gentrifiers—a white guy obnoxiously tells Jay to turn his music down in the neighborhood; white women crack insensitive jokes over brunch—but Gerima takes a dreamlike visual approach to those familiar tropes. In the brunch scene, for example, he keeps the women out of view, anonymizing them, and instead trains the camera on the ground, where blood bubbles up between the cracks. The story is deeply personal for the homegrown artist, who grew up seeing his parents teach at Howard University and running a beloved local cafe, bookstore, and video store, Sankofa, which is perched right across the street from the storied HBCU.
Against his better judgment, Gerima rushed into production and shot the first draft of his script over the summer in 2017, returning the next summer to finish out the film. Considering the film’s subject matter, the split production schedule was a nightmare for continuity. Still, it added to the film’s bona fides as a time capsule of D.C. “The process of filming Residue was a process of documentary,” he said. “My goal has been to create a record of our existence through this film. It’s an archeological artifact.”
The film, which screened at this year’s Venice Film Festival, was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array and is now available to stream on Netflix. For Gerima, it’s bittersweet to see how different the path to accessibility and distribution is for his generation, compared to the struggles his parents, both independent filmmakers, faced when trying to release their own works.
“Despite the mythology around Black Panther and how much money it made, Black stories are undervalued, and people still lack the imagination to see the distribution and commercial capabilities,” he said. “I often think back to my parents who had no such opportunities. It’s saddening.”
Still, the fact that his film was able to find a footing so quickly is a sign of change. Positive change. “I see it all as connected,” he said. “Their efforts and their struggles really helped to create the conditions for Array to exist. It’s all connected.”
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