All These Sons

All These Sons is a strong documentary that brings much more than mere awareness--it reveals the individual beings of the men it focuses on. It doesn't instill dignity; it shows that it's already present in each life.

Directors Joshua Altman and Bing Liu highlight two separate organizations seeking to reduce gun violence by working with young Black men in the neighborhoods of Chicago. As a follow-up to Minding the Gap, All These Sons could never be quite as inventive or intimately devastating, but it doesn't need to be. 

Despite the difference in form and subject, there's a decisive link between All These Sons and Minding the Gap. Both films manage to show the crucial and complex nature of formation. Who we become is influenced by innumerable factors: our neighborhood and city, our parents, the random events of our lives, the decisions of local government, the (in)justice of systems, the prejudices of others, institutional failures, systemic oppression, the stories we hear, our individual choices, and the communities we build around us. And so any act of transformation must address (or at least consider) a myriad of factors at once. For the men of IMAN and MAAFA, this means emphasizing the agency that each person has while also decrying the unjust institutional factors that prevent wider social change. The constancy of their words and actions in each young man's life is vital to drawing new horizons in their imaginations--in this way, transformation is equally counterformation.

In both films, Liu and Altman clearly depict both the difficulty and the necessity of transformation. Whether focusing on gun violence or domestic violence, they're sharpening a form of documentary that's didactic through intimacy, weaving social commentary in with personal story. It's a potent and comprehensive approach to filmmaking, and one that makes me excited to follow them through the rest of their careers.