This sensitive and vivid look at life for two young best friends is set in Chicago’s Cabrini Green public housing projects in the 90’s. Writer/Director Minhal Baig wanted to show how friendship and family can still flourish alongside dangerous conditions in a confined, inner city community. Baig came back to Chicago after her father died thinking about the grief of losing someone close and wanted to tell this story from a kids perspective. We originally screened this film at The Chicago International Film Festival in October 2023.
Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Erik (Gian Knight Ramirez) are inseparable. They go to and from school together and play on the hard tops of the housing project which is the only home they’ve ever known. Having lived in Chicago working in TV news covering Cabrini-Green, we know it was not the safest place for children, let alone anyone to live. There were gangs, drugs, and guns. It was a place where the elevators often didn’t work and police were called in constantly.
Since Cabrini Green was torn down in 2011, Baig had to re-create it, using actual blueprints to build the set for the apartments the two boys lived in and finding other buildings from that era around Chicago for exteriors. Baig also interviewed former Cabrini Green and other public housing residents to be able to portray what life was like there. She also gave the boys retro style jackets from the era that she would not let them take home so that would keep them in character on the set. Gian thought they were pretty cool.
Having to cast during COVID, Baig was lucky to find two very engaging young actors to play Malik and Erik. They were always happy together, hanging out, and exploring in and around their public housing projects. They would play basketball together, watch the trains carrying workers to and from downtown, but really loved jumping as high as they could landing on old mattresses next to the building. To them, it was joy feeling as if they could fly.
Watch our interviews with Minhal Baig about making the film and with Blake and Gian who talk about the fun scenes, emotional ones. what they learned about acting, and about Cabrini Green.
When one of their classmates is shot and killed, life changes and so does their relationship. Baig gave the boys the background of the actual death of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis who was shot and killed while walking to school from Cabrini Green. The young actors were struck by the shooting that rocked the neighborhood. In the film, Malik’s single mother, Delores (Jurnee Smollett) is worried about money and the safety of her son, herself and her mother, Anita (S. Epatha Merkerson). When she is offered a promotion to move to a safer place out of the city, she struggles deciding whether to take it and it will impact the close friendship between Malik and Erik. Smollet scenes with her son are realistically played showing her agonizing dilemma.
Baig captures heartbreaking scenes with the boys confused about how these changes will affect their inseparable friendship. Malik also has a man-to-man talk with his uncle, Jason (Lil Red Howery), about life and loss where he impresses upon the boy that it’s all part of being “grown now.”
Baig does a pretty good job letting these well-cast boys express their feelings in conversation, but, at times, their declarations to the world get a little heavy-handed. Still Blake and Gian are convincing as a couple of best friends reaching an age and situation having have to deal with life’s changes. The buildings where Cabrini Green once stood are gone, but echoes of the voices of the people who resided there live poignantly through this film.
Sony Pictures Classics 1 hour 33 minutes PG
Related posts:
Knives Out Writer/Director Rian Johnson talks about having the whole cast on the set
Eddie Redmayne and Tom Harper talk challenges making The Aeronauts
THE CAMPERS AT THE SUNDANCE PREMIERE OF CRIP CAMP: A DISABILITY REVOLUTION TALK ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE AND THE FILM.
Ford v Ferrari Stunt Coordinator, Robert Nagle
Interview with Waves stars Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Taylor Russell and Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults talking teen angst, family and sound design.
Santa Barbara International Film Festival, February 7th – February 17th
