Photographer Khalik Allah’s feature début deftly combines a classic observational documentary style with an experimental format. Filmed at the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York’s East Harlem, this asynchronous audiovisual collage captures the voices and bleary faces of the homeless people that gather there with touching humanity. With no trace of judgement, Allah paints a portrait of this vulnerable population that is as beautiful as it is painfully sad, revealing the depths of their drug dependencies. Taking on the complexity of the topic with aplomb, he spins a nuanced but biting truth on social disparities related to race through his shots of intoxicated bodies. These “field niggas” are contextualized as a contemporary iteration of the “field negroes,” described by Malcolm X as indigent slaves who toiled in the fields and refused to pledge allegiance to the slaveowner, in contrast to the “house negroes,” a better-clothed and fed minority who worked and lived in the master’s house. In the modern United States, a heterogenous society where disparities between social classes are ubiquitous, lynchings are far from a thing of the past. This intimate polyphonic portrait demonstrates the limitless resilience of its subjects with great acuity. In the words of one woman recorded by Allah, “If you’re strong, I’m your weakness. All my niggas ride-or-die.”

Pascale Ferland
Filmmaker, teacher and programmer