I Will Follow: Begin a New Black Film Movement!

Admittedly, I hate most Tyler Perry movies as much as the next black person for all the obvious reasons. But for the last several years, if you want to see a movie about Black people-and have Black people be in the theater, that’s been mostly our only option. So I went, and watched mostly in horror, but I long to be in the theater with Black people, and long even more to see Black stories on the screen, and I go even though I know I am going to be disappointed. It is what it is.

So when I found out there was a new project namely the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), that was dedicated to ensuring independent Black films could get distribution through film festivals and a relationship with the AMC chain, I was elated.

Then I saw the first release, I Will Follow. This film, directed, written, and produced (on a $50,000 budget and shot in 15 days) by Ana DuVernay (who founded AFFRM to help create a distribution mechanism for this film and others like it), is really a breath of fresh air in an otherwise terrible environment for Black filmmakers and actors.

The film is really about how people deal with death-and how death always brings family into conflict, when they remember the life of the dead very differently. But the film is so much more than that.

Salli Richardson-Whitfield, who really for the first time gets to show what a great actress she is, plays the niece of the departed aunt (who’s a legendary studio session drummer), played by Beverly Todd. I was going to write more of a political critique of the film, and why it is different, but my friends Yolo Akili and Moya Bailey actually do a really great job of naming those elements of the film, so watch the video.

But I think they stylistic elements are also amazing. The soundtrack is beautfiul and understated-especially in a time when many filmmakers beat you over the head with music, clearly in order to sell another product-the soundtrack itself. With only $50,000 and 15 days, Duvernay has made a beautiful looking film, and I love the way she uses time-it sort of bleeds back and forth, as we often do when we’re remembering-sitting in one place, doing one thing, and our imaginations have transported us back to another moment, and it feels just as alive as the present.

Some will say that I am shitting on Tyler Perry, Black comedies and other movies made for Black “folk” tastes, but that’s not the issue for me. This movie has some really funny moments so comedy is not the issue per se. But I would say that Perry does not so much as present a Black America that many of us doesn’t want to see or acknowledge as he often states, but he portrays a mythic Black community that far too many of us are invested in promoting. I Will Follow is a story not full of cliche but is about a very specific Black experience that is really rich and complicated, where we’re all present-young and old, mixed-race and not, Black wealthy, bohemian and working class, straight and queer, etc.

Duvernay is aware of what she’s up against, and chose to make this film anyway. She told the Miami Herald “I think when you look at the fact that this year, so far, the studios have released one film starring a black woman, and it’s ‘Big Momma,’ that statement to me is really profound,” she said, referring to the third installment in the Martin Lawrence drag comedy franchise.

“It’s really about the studios feeling what will sell to a mass audience, not developing films that appeal to niches and smaller groups. We all sit around and complain about the studio system, complain about men in dresses. The bottom line is, the energy I spent complaining about them is energy I can put into making a film about a happy black woman who is taking her destiny in her own hands.”