Critic Reviews

Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.

Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.

Residue is a delicately balanced film that lands its points while exploring these conversations from angles that are often unseen.

Residue is the kind of movie to make you wonder what may have changed in D.C. during even the short span of its own making. Gentrification works quickly; it arrives buoyed by a whirlwind sense of the rug being swept from under residents’ feet. These are details Gerima builds into the movie based on his experience of leaving for just one year. Jay is returning after time in college. One can only imagine his shock.

Residue is about colonization, and through the creative choices he makes, Gerima suggests that colonization stories don’t actually have to be about the colonizers themselves. Instead, he maintains a personal touch over the picture and the narrative, about a homecoming that goes slowly awry over the course of a 90 minute duration.

Gerima films Jay’s intimate confrontations with an impressionistic flair that focusses attention on characters’ listening, thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening conflicts with the pressure of history—both social and intimate.

Elliptical and teasingly (but beautifully) photographed, it can give the impression of an experimental work but ultimately has a direct story to tell, one whose specificity doesn't in the least diminish its broader relevance.

Though as leisurely as a summer’s day, this kaleidoscopic memory film has an intensity of purpose that wants to knock you on your heels — or maybe harder — in its take on gentrification.

The bleak outlook of this story won’t be to every taste. But Residue brings a painful beauty to a real-life “whitewashing” of a city that will never let you look at gentrification from a realtor’s point of view ever again.

Residue is a delicately layered depiction of the dance between alienation and belonging. In this moving portrait, it’s a dance is defined by struggle, grief and undiminished grace.