Residue (2020) - Merawi Gerima

While it can be didactic and prescriptive in its sociopolitical aspirations, Residue remains a strong debut feature largely because of its quiet moments of introspection. These moments are imbued with a lived-in authenticity due to their personal nature, instilling the film with a raw emotional energy that ultimately provides far more credence and poignancy to the film's thematic intentions than its scripted dramatics ever could.  Residue at times doesn't seem to trust its audience, expounding its message through some artificial narrative devices which can be grating, yet in these more personal moments of introspection, which are beautifully rendered by immersive aural and visual aesthetics, Residue manages to contextualize the struggle for racial equality in a far more substantive way, through natural, emotional transference.  By incorporating identity and memory into its bold formalism, Residue, evokes instead of expounds the panoply of emotions which make up the African American experience in America - pain, guilt, anger, acceptance, etc. run congruent and incongruent, there is no singular way to quantify collective, heterogeneous pain.  With that in mind, Residue operates at its best when the personal and collective aspects of identity are interpreted and examined in unison, as the film emotes instead of instructs through its chief characterization.  Its message on gentrification is salient yet too forceful at times, unwilling to trust its audience to decipher the vicissitudes of fortune that disproportionately and negatively effect the minority community through its chief characterization alone.  Gentrification is merely a symptom of the ills of the larger state apparatus, whose authority under the current polity subverts socially ethical outcomes and displaces communities due largely to the promises of prosperity proposed by capital.  A beautiful mosaic at its best, Residue manages to overcome its more detrimental desires to message-make narratively thanks to an immersive formal structure and aesthetic style which signals a belief in the transference of affect.