THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Open your eyes wide, because it is a question not to miss anything of the beautiful work which is given to us to see in Residue, first feature film written, produced, directed and edited by Merawi Gerima, African-American of Ethiopian origin. It should be noted that this gifted and creative thirty-something is the son of directors Hailé Gerima (born in 1946) and Shirikiana Aina (born in 1955), figures of independent African-American cinema and members of the LA Rebellion movement (Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash…). Merawi Gerima fits into this rich lineage in her own way, assuming her radicalism and her rejection of narrative stereotypes. Of Residue, autobiographical film, recounting the return to his Washington neighborhood of a filmmaker named Jay (Obi Nwachukwu), double of Merawi Gerima, We first retain the strength of the image, signed Mark Jeevaratnam: its agility to slip the present into the past, its narrative power combining the great history of Afro-American struggles and the small one, finally its reflections and overlays connecting memories floating magnet us on the screen.
See Residue, it is to enter the mental kaleidoscope of his main character, which carries within him a heavy feeling of guilt, his professional success and his geographical distance widening all the more the gap with his lost friends. Jay arrives from Los Angeles, parks his pick-up and barely recognizes the streets where he spent his childhood, as the atmosphere has become gentrified with the arrival of the whites. He wants to make a film here, in Eckington, to give voice to his relatives who still live there, and to leave a mark (residue) of all these lives abused by police raids, the indifference of the public authorities, the ravages of drugs. So much for the scenario line, on which will be grafted the pangs of Jay, haunted by the absent, dead or detained, and apostrophized by his family: what comes to do “Mr. cinema” after so many years, he seriously believes that his film will have any effect?
Scream of rage
Jay’s unease, his difficulty in starting the writing of the feature film, install the mise en abyme of the “film within the film”. Merawi Gerima himself decided to realize Residue when he returned to Washington in 2016, the shoot (in 2017 and 2018) acting as an outlet for his anger. The aesthetic choices sublimate the cry of rage, which mutates into a performative gesture. By distilling images from the past without granting them a defined status – memories, hallucinations? … -, Merawi Gerima puts the spectator’s imagination to work: thus, the images of Jay as a child (Jacary Dye) possibly fall under the flashback, or maybe they are projections of the director, fantasizing about his future feature film … Residue takes us into the labyrinth of formal choices, which have sometimes been dictated by the low budget: how to tell the past, renew the genre of militant film, as practiced by the elders, Spike Lee to name only him? The succession is more than assured.
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