Mayor Lori Lightfoot is proposing a ban on alcohol sales after midnight in stores, and as my colleague Gregory Pratt reported this week, this follows “efforts in recent years by some aldermen concerned about violence and loitering near liquor stores to set earlier hours.”
Marshall Hatch Jr. is featured in the documentary “All These Sons” (screening Friday at the ChiTown Movies Drive-In in Pilsen as part of the Doc10 film festival) and I wonder if he would describe this idea as “putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.” That’s a phrase he uses in the film when talking about small, incremental steps toward shaping a different reality for young Black men who are likely to have gun violence in their lives, either as victims or shooters. “Because what ultimately needs to change are the conditions that produce shootings in the first place,” he says.
He’s talking about much-needed massive investment in Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides that could fundamentally and materially improve people’s day to day lives. In the meantime, community organizations like his own — the MAAFA Redemption Project on the West Side — are doing what they can. And that’s the entry point for filmmakers Joshua Altman and Bing Liu (the latter of whom directed the 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary “Minding the Gap”), who have centered their documentary around the emotional lives of a handful of young men in Chicago.
Shamont Slaughter is among those featured. He can be boisterous and gregarious, and wears a mustache and a capital B tattooed on his right cheekbone. We see him thrilled about his girlfriend’s pregnancy, and then devastated when she miscarries. Everything sort of falls apart momentarily, as he blows through the money he was saving for the baby, before he finds steady ground again. At his lowest, he tells the filmmakers: “Y’all don’t have to be recording everything. Get the camera out of my face.” And the filming stops.
I asked Altman and Liu how they navigated these kinds of questions around privacy. “We told everybody that if there’s any point where you don’t want us filming, you guys are in control and all you have to do is tell us not to film,” Altman said. “For the most part, people were very open to being filmed, because their stories are not being told. The stories that everybody was seeing were clips on the news, but nobody was painting a human portrait of the people who were living this experience on the ground. Marshall early on told me, ‘Go talk to the experts,’ and I said, ‘Well, we don’t really want experts in the film, per se,’ and he said, ‘No, I mean the young guys. They are the experts.'”
Another organization featured in the film is the Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) on the South Side, which had previously been spotlighted on a CBS special a few years back that “kind of went down that sensationalist route that Josh and I grit our teeth at,” said Liu. “We had to explain that we weren’t those types of filmmakers. We do verité and we want to do more human stories that put the guys first, rather than sensationalist issues.”
Billy Moore is a case manager at IMAN and Chicagoans of a certain age may recognize his name: In 1984, at the age of 16, he shot and killed fellow teenager Ben Wilson, who was a basketball star at Simeon High School. At the time, Wilson was considered the No. 1 player in the country. After serving nearly 20 years in prison, Moore has spent his life trying to help younger generations head off the same fate. He’s thoughtful and indefatigable, but also realistic about the ways the city has failed so many neighborhoods: “The police’s job is to respond to crime. There is really no plan in place to prevent crime.”
The film also spends time with Zay Manning, who has short dreadlocks and a quiet charisma: “We live looking over our shoulders every day,” he says. During the course of filming, he is shot several times. Afterward, he is reluctant to talk about the experience. It’s too intense. Too big. Too risky to be vulnerable. The thought of retribution, of maintaining a hard exterior, is always front of mind. Manning knows it’s a trap: “I don’t want to be doing this, but I’m forced to do this.”
Part of what Marshall’s program does is to help extricate people from those feelings. But it takes money. At one point, the film observes Hatch on a call with funders and the tone on both ends is polite but strained. Afterward, Hatch turns to his father (who is pastor of the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church) and says: “The funniest comment was, ‘Well, we know that some are high risk, but we want the highest risk.”
Hatch Sr. is flabbergasted: “What does that mean? That’s everybody the hell over here. It’s the funding war. That’s why nothing ever changes, ya know?”
I was curious about some of the decision making behind-the-scenes. Altman is white; Liu is Chinese American. More often than not, documentaries about Black people are helmed by white directors. Did Altman and Liu have conversations about whether they were the right people to tell this story?
“For me it was just weighing the moral balancing sheet,” Liu said. “There hadn’t been a documentary done close to this subject since ‘The Interrupters’ (from 2011) and the work that we’re seeing with these programs is a lot more holistic than what CeaseFire was doing in responding to specific violent incidents and preventing those from happening. So first of all I was like, this story needs to be told: Check. Then I moved on to: OK, should I be telling this story?
“And this was at a point in my career where I was working as a camera assistant. ‘Minding the Gap’ hadn’t yet been completed and I had no idea it was going to blow up. So it was a career opportunity for me to get paid to direct a film.
“And then three: Yeah, I am an outsider to this community, but who are the other people who could or would tell this story and give it the sort of sensitivity that I would bring to it? I don’t know; I didn’t know that many people back then. And because of all the labs and events I had gone through in trying to get funding for ‘Minding the Gap,’ I felt like I was well-versed in the ethics of documentary filmmaking. Like, I wasn’t just a guy going in with a camera. I had worked with (documentary production house) Kartemquin for a couple years at that point, and one thing they talk about there are ethics and who holds the power, both in the bigger picture level but also on an everyday level.
“The last thing I’ll say is that I think it gets at a bigger structural issue. Should there be somebody from the community telling this story? Yes. Was somebody going to be getting this opportunity at that time? I don’t think so. If this project came to me today, I probably wouldn’t take it. But those are the things I weighed in my head. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but that was my thought process.”
For Altman, “On a bigger level right now, I don’t like the conversation of people saying, ‘Black filmmakers should be able to tell these Black stories’ — implying that those are the only stories they get to tell.”
Here’s the reality, though: Black documentary filmmakers do not get as many opportunities or access to funding to tell any stories, period. The annual Black Harvest Film Festival at the Siskel Film Center focuses on indie Black cinema and I often cover it with a particular interest in the documentary lineup; each year, the vast majority of those films are from white filmmakers.
“I do think the industry is changing,” Altman said. “But before I took this on, I had the same dilemma as Bing. Why should I be telling this? A few things that I reckoned with are, one: I’ve been working as an editor for the last decade and pretty much every film I take on is not about white Jewish people, which is how I grew up. I always try to go outside my bubble, and that’s the beauty of documentary — you get to go inside somebody else’s world and see it from their eyes.
“And then two: Every step of the way, when we would come into a community, people would ask us these same questions. I would tell them, ‘I don’t feel comfortable sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing, that doesn’t feel right.'”
The decision was made to screen the film for its participants early on in the process, Altman said, “so that we could allow them to have informed opinions and influence what the film would be.”
According to Liu, “I think they were really surprised, because they were used to a more sensationalist style of storytelling about their neighborhoods. They were surprised to see something much more grounded and human and emotional. I think for Zay, just by personality, he’s really shy and doesn’t want to be in the limelight. And seeing the film he realized that, oh, this is a real film that’s going to be seen by a lot of people, and he had some reservations.
“And then Marshall said something, we were on a group Zoom call, and he said, ‘You know, Zay, it’s almost divine that out of all the folks that could have had their stories told, yours ended up being one that was featured in the film. It’s a blessing in a way. But it’s also a huge responsibility and you’re going to have to wear that on your shoulders to continue the work we see in the film.’ And we could all just see Zay soaking that in and being like, ‘OK, I hear that.’ It was a real turning point I think for him, specifically.”
The filmmakers and the film’s subjects will all be at Friday’s screening.
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