Quest

It would be some­thing of an under­state­ment to describe Jonathan Olshefski’s won­der­ful, free­wheel­ing doc­u­men­tary, Quest, as a labour of love, because the effort this indus­tri­ous direc­tor under­went to col­lect the footage we see here is noth­ing short of hero­ic. He spent the best part of ten years in the com­pa­ny of North Philadelphia’s Rainey clan: no-non­sense matri­arch Christine’a; pep­py tomboy daugh­ter PJ; and kind-heart­ed patri­arch Christo­pher, whose adopts the alter-ego Quest when man­ning the pro­duc­tion desk of his base­ment music studio.

Ini­tial­ly, Olshef­s­ki co-opt­ed the Raineys as the sub­ject of an urban pho­tog­ra­phy project, then he want­ed some­thing more, and so he began to doc­u­ment their sur­pris­ing­ly event­ful lives on film. Then, when he thought his time with them had come to a nat­ur­al close, real life inter­vened and he quick­ly returned with his cam­eras ready to roll. An extra­or­di­nary and hor­rif­ic inci­dent which occurs at the film’s mid-point is a tes­ta­ment to art of patient obser­va­tion and how it’s not just the job of a film­mak­er to leach from the mis­ery of oth­ers, but to del­i­cate­ly sup­ply con­text for that suffering.

The result is a seam­less com­pres­sion of time in which this supreme­ly sto­ical work­ing class black fam­i­ly roll with the punch­es of pover­ty, puber­ty and the fact that their neigh­bour­hood has appar­ent­ly fall­en between the cracks of gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion. On the 4^th July every­one goes to gawp at the local fire­works dis­play, but for the remain­der of the year, deaf­en­ing fire-cracks are sup­plied by live rounds being dis­charged between crim­i­nals and drug users. The film begins with the fam­i­ly gath­ered around their small tele­vi­sion set and air-punch­ing as Barack Oba­ma is inau­gu­rat­ed as Pres­i­dent of the USA. It comes to an omi­nous close as the baton is hand­ed to Don­ald Trump, with His Orange­ness bark­ing to black vot­ers: ​“what have you got to lose?”

A mas­sive amount is the answer to that ill-con­cieved cat call, as the Raineys are a fam­i­ly who chan­nel a mas­sive amount of their hum­ble resources into doing what they can to enhance the frag­ile ecosys­tem of their com­mu­ni­ty. Christo­pher hosts a famous open mic night where latchkey teens gath­er to have their rhymes record­ed and pro­duced. They’re not being fast-tracked to fame or any­thing like that, just being told that there are peo­ple out there will­ing to give them a leg-up in life. When the going gets tough, they don’t need to resort to vio­lence as a means to an end.

It’s a mov­ing and mean­der­ing work about every­day strug­gles and the respon­si­bil­i­ties that come from being part of a fam­i­ly. It also offers a sub­tle com­par­i­son between what you might call bio­log­i­cal and civic fam­i­lies, and the the dif­fer­ent types of love we can and should extend towards one another.