In the first few days of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, I saw films depicting the struggle of Black communities and families in many places, shapes, and forms. Two narrative features and two documentaries, covering both satire and drama, stories both contemporary and historical, and locations stretching from North Carolina to New England to France.
The features American Fiction and Les Indésirables dramatize the struggles facing Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic. But in a twist from the stereotypical norm, the American film tackles Black America via the middle class, the arts, and Academia, while the French film takes on Black poverty in a story about the projects outside of Paris.
American fiction is the feature debut of one of our greatest TV writers, Cord Jefferson. In addition to winning an Emmy for writing the revelatory episode of Watchmen that revealed The Hooded Justice to be a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Jefferson has also been a key figure in the writers rooms for Succession, The Good Place, and Master of None.
Jeffrey Wright stars as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist whose work confuses the literary community because it doesn’t center on his own Blackness. So on a lark of frustration, Monk quickly knocks out a hacky, stereotypical “Black story” about a drug dealer’s life on the streets—disguised as a memoir under the name “Stagg R. Leigh”—only to see it become a literary sensation. And that’s just some of what American Fiction has in store; it’s also a movie about family, mortality, adult relationships, and the Black middle class that American pop culture so frequently ignores.
American Fiction is probably the most ambitious film I’ve seen at the fest so far, and that’s both a good and bad thing. At times it feels like it’s trying to do too much, and I wonder if it might have worked better as a miniseries than as a two-hour film. In his first screenplay for a feature film, Jefferson struggles to explore everything he introduces. For example, at one point a major character dies suddenly, and it felt both narratively unnecessary and quickly forgotten.
But what’s great about American Fiction is that nearly every scene has something to say, and says it well. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, and Traci Ellis-Ross all turning in wonderfully memorable supporting work. But it’s Wright who absolutely owns the movie; it’s the best role of his career, and he bites into it with a performance that reckons with Blackness and its American cultural expectations in profoundly believable ways. At times, Wright’s acting almost erodes the realization that you’re watching a satire.
I’ve seen a few critics and pundits predict that American Fiction could become one of the major films of the year, both culturally and critically, and that it’s a contender for the highly coveted TIFF People’s Choice Award (the last 11 consecutive winners of which have cruised to Best Picture nominations, including three winners). I’m not ready to go that far on any of those claims, and if anything I worry about the expectations they may set up for a very smart and very entertaining movie that doesn’t always work. But to ape what Kyle Buchanan recently said about Poor Things, “Sure, it’s a lot, but most movies aren’t enough.” And for the feature debut of one of my favorite TV writers, it was everything I hoped for.
Les Indésirables also managed to neither more nor less than what I expected. The second feature by Ladj Ly—the French filmmaker whose previous film, Les Misérables, was nominated for Best International Film at the Oscars—Les Indésirables is a clear companion piece to its predecessor. Both take place in the projects outside of Paris, and both are about the antagonistic and combustible circumstances the residents find themselves in with those who lord over them.
But the power doing the lording has changed; while Ly’s first film was about residents against the police, this time it’s residents against the municipal government. The end result, though, stays the same, and events spiral into a tense, explosive, sadly inevitable conclusion with no winners.
Les Indésirables is a bit more of a slow burn than its predecessor; while Les Misérables maintained more of a fever pitch intensity for most of its runtime, Ly’s new film takes its time getting there. Of course that’s not a bad thing, and with the film’s focus on policy rather than policing, it makes perfect sense for the combustibility to be less immediate. It’ll be interesting to see whether Ladj Ly continues playing in the same sandbox (and extends his Paris Projects films into a trilogy), or whether he expands his scope the next time out. But no matter how small the geographic range of his films, Les Indésirables proves that he certainly hasn’t run out of things to say.
Stamped From the Beginning and Silver Dollar Road are two documentaries about American racism that also take opposite narrative strategies. Stamped goes big, broad, and back, starting from the beginning of the African slave trade and getting all the way to Trump in under 90 minutes. Based on the 600-page history of racist ideas by Ibram X. Kendi (author of How to Be an Antiracist), the film obviously doesn’t exhaust the depths of the source material; but in terms of bringing the book’s ideas to a home-viewing, second-screening Netflix audience, it does an admirable job.
Stamped From the Beginning was directed by Roger Ross Williams, who also made 2019’s documentary about Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, and won an Oscar for the short film Music by Prudence. Williams has always been a good storyteller and a creative miner of history, but he outdoes himself here. For as much as Stamped may try to cover too much ground, the editing of the film and the curation of clip montages is consistently gripping. Independent of the film’s perhaps-too-big educational ambitions, it’s a stunning work of cultural archeology and juxtaposition.
Kendi is on hand to narrate some of the film himself, but the lion’s share of talking head duties fall to Black women, who help drive home the film’s point of the underrepresented and unheard. At its best, Stamped From the Beginning feels like a less poetic version of I Am Not Your Negro, hyper-targeted to the Zoomer Generation. But that’s not a pejorative; every generation needs to learn this stuff, however they’re best able to do it. Stamped From the Beginning meets them on their ground, and on their terms. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more informative and engaging set of Cliff’s Notes.
Sadly the same isn’t true of Silver Dollar Road, by Raoul Peck (the actual director of I Am Not Your Negro). Where Stamped went as broad as its possible for a film to go, Silver Dollar Road hyper-focuses on one Black family living on North Carolina’s outer banks, fighting against developers and racist laws to retain the land that their family has owned since shortly after the Civil War.
The film is adapted from a piece of investigative journalism co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker, and it tells a compelling, tragic, and important story. But the sad reality is that the written piece tells the story far better than the film. I understand the impetus of adapting the piece into a film; while the story in the published piece is mostly told by the investigative journalist who wrote it, the film leans heavily on the family telling their own story. But therein lies the problem: the family doesn’t fully understand the arcane and labyrinthine laws they’ve been subjected to, and explaining them takes the acumen and experience of an investigative journalist.
The film certainly contains more empathy and heart than its written counterpart, and there’s an undeniable power in watching people regaling their own fight against The Man. But without the necessary explainers, you’ll come out of Silver Dollar Road with more questions than you had going in. And to answer those questions, you’ll end up turning to the source material that you could have just read in the first place.
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