Residue review – haunting drama on the dangers of gentrification
Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.
Writer and director Merawi Gerima’s debut, released by Ava DuVernay’s independent film collective Array, tells a prodigal son story, about a man returning to his old stomping grounds. And in that story, Gerima experiments with performance and vérité, intimate narrative and poetic abstractions. His artistry is thoughtful. But more than anything, it’s emotional.
Gerima comes from black filmmaking royalty. His father is Haile
Gerima, the Bush Mama and Sankofa director who collaborated in the late 60s with fellow black UCLA graduates like Charles Burnett and Julie Dash. There are traces of Burnett’s Killer of
Sheep in Residue, as well as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. That’s just one way the past echoes throughout the young Gerima’s debut.
We can assume the film’s lead character is fashioned after the young director himself, at least on a practical level. Obi Nwachukwu plays Jay, a filmmaker who travels from Los Angeles to Washington DC. He wants to make a movie about DC’s Q Street, his childhood home and the friends he used to roam with.
Residue’s grave terms are spoken early on. A disembodied voiceover asks whether Jay’s camera is a weapon trying to save the community or whether the film-maker is actually an archaeologist coming to unearth bones from the concrete. As if resigned to the inevitable, the film documents black culture in the city as if it needs to be fossilized on camera. The opening is a rush of images and sounds from a DC block party. The black community dances on the street while local rap group CCB’s Roll Call bumps on the soundtrack. Then come the police and white residents walking their dogs. That prologue sums things up.
Upon arriving in his old neighbourhood, 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. But Gerima purposefully obscures white faces or keeps them out of frame. Unlike these neighborhoods, his film centres black