Difference between revisions of "Residue (2020)"

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Latest revision as of 06:41, 15 March 2021

Residue.png

Residue is an award-winning poetic drama directed, written, produced and edited by Merawi Gerima. The film is an official selection for the 77th Venice International Film Festival. Originally from Washington, DC, and a USC School of Cinematic Arts graduate, RESIDUE marks Gerima’s feature directorial debut.[1]

The film is about gentrification in Washington, D.C. Jay (Obi Nwachukwu), who’s been away for years attending film school in Los Angeles, returns home to find his old neighborhood, Q Street, populated with affluent white people and his parents’ home, now elsewhere in the city, hounded by real estate investors looking to snatch it up.[2]

Plot

Jay (Obinna Nwachukwu) grew up in a Washington, D.C., neighborhood surrounded by Black kids. His family moved off the block in hopes of escaping drug-dealing activity, and later, Jay fled entirely — moving to California for college, where he studied filmmaking. Now he's back, intending to make a movie about his old street. But the old street is barely there. White people are all over — loaded down with shopping bags, putting up giant fences, using "have a nice day" as a form of aggression when locals don't behave as they wish. The camera sometimes sneaks up on them, overhearing their brunch talk about "the old version of D.C.," in which "old" is a synonym for bad, and for poor, and for Black. But Jay keeps his distance, with a confused look on his face that often signifies anger as well.[3]

Upon arriving in his old neighborhood, Jay is “greeted” by a white resident who tells him to turn down the volume on his truck stereo. That command is followed by a loaded warning should he not comply: “Don’t make me have to call the cops.” For sale signs litter the street. Realtors leave repeat voicemails at Jay’s parents’ house, eagerly offering cash for their home. Jay lurches through the neighborhood, his brow permanently furrowed, as if he’s blinded by all the whiteness he’s seeing.[4]

Jay searches for friends at the homes or on the corners or stoops they once occupied. Some moved. Others are locked up. The spaces in Q Street feel full with absence. Jay can’t get hold of an old friend, Demetrius, and none of the remaining locals will be straight with him. His parents are well-situated, and own two properties including their old brownstone on Q Street where Jay is staying in an apartment, but Jay himself is deeply destabilized by what he’s come back to. The flashbacks that ensue refuse nostalgia, and instead look frankly at the neighborhood before it was whitewashed—seeing its beauty as well as its terror on every inch of the block.

The residents that’s left is the few who are still hanging on in a heavily policed and speculated landscape. As they go about their fairly mundane daily business, Black locals work together to keep their young men alive and out of prison while dealing with both aggressive and benign intrusions from their new white neighbors, from a cheery-voiced threat to call the cops to an awkwardly insistent invite to a Fourth of July party. In the midst of it, Jay is hoping to write a screenplay about Q Street. He wants to “give a voice to the voiceless,” but a few of his old acquaintances, including the resentful Delonte (Dennis Lindsey), understand his project to be yet another form of exploitation. Jay may be from the place, but he’s no longer in it.[2]

Black Racism

The places Jay used to know are no longer there because of gentrification. The people he used to know which is Black skinned people are gone because they were incarcerated or murdered by the police. These two different assaults on Black life are symptomatic of the same problem — racism — and they have the same effect of warping Q Street beyond recognition.

Also in the opening scene when Jay just came back to his home in Q street, he was greeted by white-skinned neighbor who tells him to turn down his truck stereo and being threatened to call the police on him.

The old neighborhood Jay used to know when he was kid now gone, all this dark-skinned friends and now gone and treated unfairly by the lighter-skinned new comer and the old community pushed to side even have troubled life going to jail.

Inspired by Personal Experience

The filmmaker recently told Vanity Fair that Residue was inspired by a personal experience, when he left D.C. for a year and found, upon his return in 2016, that things had changed. “It was too much for my system to take,” he told the magazine. “I was going down this dark path of pure anger with no outlet.” And that was after only a year — a span eerily reflected in the movie’s own production history. Gerima shot a first draft of the film’s script in the summer of 2017; he finished the movie next summer.[5]

External Link

Watch ARRAY's RESIDUE Teaser Trailer at Youtube

References

  1. ARRAY's RESIDUE Teaser Trailer | Directed by Merawi Gerima. ARRAY Youtube Channel. Retrieved January 21, 2021.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Da Costa, Cassie. The feature film debut of director Merawi Gerima is a stunning examination of gentrification’s effects on a Black family in Washington, D.C.. The Daily Beast. 25 September 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
  3. DeFore, John. 'Residue': Film Review. The Hollywood Reporter. 17 September 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2021.
  4. Simonpillai, Radheyan. Residue review – haunting drama on the dangers of gentrification. The Guardian. 17 September 2021. Retrieved January 21, 2021.
  5. Collins, Austin. Poetic Drama ‘Residue’ Makes Gentrification Personal. Rolling Stone. 22 September 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2021.