grew up in northeast Washington D.C., an area that plays prominently in his first feature “Residue,” about a film student named Jay who returns home after a stint at USC film school to find his neighborhood gentrified and his family and friends contending with racist hostility from new white neighbors. Just like Jay, Gerima went to USC. He wrote and directed “Residue” to give a voice to his eviscerated neighborhood’s survivors, including himself.
I’m only able to tell you this now, in retrospect, because I was recently going through my journal. And in 2011 I had an entry about when I had just found out some bad news about one of the guys I grew up with. This story had been floating around in my mind and when the two combined, everything started making sense.
Growing up you have no sense of who is in office. You have no sense of any wars that are happening around the world. You have no sense of the economy, any of that. Really all you know is that so and so got locked up. Or so and so got shot, or killed. Or so and so just ran through your house running from the police, and your mother is hiding them or suturing some wounds.
After your film launched from Slamdance, George Floyd was brutally killed and the movement for Black people’s rights gained momentum. How do you feel about the timing of its release in the U.S.?
Director Merawi Gerima on ‘Residue’ as a Weapon in Battle for Black People’s Rights