Residue

Last month the Wash­ing­ton Post ran a tone-deaf arti­cle singing the prais­es of Eck­ing­ton, a res­i­den­tial bor­ough with a rich his­to­ry in north­east Wash­ing­ton DC, and one of the most rapid­ly gen­tri­fy­ing neigh­bour­hoods in Amer­i­ca. The con­cerned reser­va­tions of a Black mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional Eck­ing­ton native are sand­wiched between the glib mus­ings of two white trans­plants, one a moti­va­tion­al speak­er and the oth­er a for­mer advi­sor at Tes­la. ​“There hasn’t been any con­flict between old and new, but we’re very mind­ful of that,” one notes; ​“There’s some­thing about the ener­gy here that feels very real,” remarks the other.

The sit­u­a­tion on the ground is indeed very real for life­long res­i­dents of Eck­ing­ton, the set­ting and sub­ject of Mer­awi Gerima’s stun­ning debut fea­ture, Residue. It tells the sto­ry of Jay (Obi Nwachuk­wu), a young Black man in a state of post-grad­u­ate cre­ative nos­tal­gia who, after com­plet­ing a film degree at a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia uni­ver­si­ty, returns home to DC to find it rav­aged by the forces of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, over-incar­cer­a­tion and racist police violence.

He wants to see his par­ents, he wants to recon­nect with the old neigh­bour­hood, and he plans to make a film about it all. ​“Just try­ing to give a voice to the voice­less,” he tells Delonte (Den­nis Lind­sey), a child­hood friend who grows instant­ly sus­pi­cious. ​“Who’s voice­less?” he shoots back, his sour­ing expres­sion like a clos­ing door.

Residue tells a uni­ver­sal­ly relat­able sto­ry: What hap­pens when you come home after a long time away only to find that both you and the place have changed beyond recog­ni­tion. It’s a res­o­nant theme that has been giv­en clas­sic treat­ments by some of the world’s lead­ing film­mak­ers, yet in Gerima’s hands it feels blis­ter­ing­ly new.

Ger­i­ma is the son of Ethiopi­an film­mak­er and icon of the LA Rebel­lion move­ment, Haile Ger­i­ma. There’s some­thing in the sound design that links Residue to the elder Gerima’s explo­sive 1976 break­out, Bush Mama. A sim­i­lar lay­er­ing of both believ­ably diegetic city sounds and estrang­ing, non-diegetic voiceovers and inter­po­si­tions that whirl into son­ic fields rich with character.

Where in Bush Mama, sound con­stricts, mim­ic­k­ing the claus­tro­pho­bic con­di­tions of hyper-sur­veilled life in 1970s Watts, in Residue, sound lib­er­ates. The younger Gerima’s patient­ly observed sound­scapes slow­ly expand – rub­ber crack­ling on asphalt, wind through gum trees, chil­dren play­ing, looped and dis­tort­ed cuts of nar­ra­tion – shuck­ing off the hard shells of stereo­type and sta­tis­tics to pre­serve the ten­der core of a com­mu­ni­ty on the brink of extinction.

With its inge­nious son­ic palette, the rich, aurat­ic fields of colour that sift through each frame, the deft, intu­itive edit­ing by Ger­i­ma him­self, and a non-pro­fes­sion­al cast and crew scout­ed large­ly from the com­mu­ni­ty and trained on set, Residue entire­ly walks the rad­i­cal pol­i­tics that it talks. But Gerima’s rest­less crit­i­cal mind tun­nels fur­ther still, the­ma­tis­ing his own inse­cu­ri­ties over appoint­ing him­self some­thing of a native infor­mant for the sake of art.

Pitched-down nar­ra­tion with the cadence of a growl opens the film: ​“Did you sense that our oblit­er­a­tion was right around the cor­ner?” it asks of Jay, who lies plain­tive­ly on his stom­ach. ​“You brought the only weapon you had, a cam­era… You thought a film could save us? Or did you see your­self as an arche­ol­o­gist, com­ing to unearth our bones from the con­crete.” If Ger­i­ma can bring him­self to believe that art real­ly can incite polit­i­cal insur­rec­tion, this is sure­ly the piece to do it.