Synopsis

I spent my summers in South Carolina, the place my father insists is my home. I was always fascinated by the stories my grandmother and cousin Bunny (Vermelle Smith Rodrigues) would tell me during our summers in Georgetown. Stories deeply rooted in Gullah culture – the coastal southern, recipes and incantations for survival. I soaked up everything that was said from my perch on my grandmother’s porch. After Sherman is my journey to explore my relationship with my father and to this land, we call home. We weave in and out of the present-day low country, home videos, and the historical archive, investigating the history of African people on this land, and the cultural and spiritual rituals that banded people together.

On June 17th, 2015 I spoke to my mother in the late afternoon. My parents were on their way to lead a quarterly meeting at Mother Emanuel church, a church under my father’s supervision. Within several hours, nine parishioners were dead including Reverend Pinckney. My parents had left the church just twenty minutes before the shooting began. My father was appointed interim pastor of Emanuel AME Church in the aftermath of the shooting. In a state of incomprehensible shock, I began to work on my film with new urgency. I filmed another drive alone in the car with my dad, this time a silent drive to open the church that Sunday for worship.

After Sherman is about our collective American inheritance. In the same manner, Aretha Franklin was able to hold popular music and protest in a single breath, I carefully orchestrate this film to be both a history lesson and a visual survey - a reclamation of space and the acknowledgment of a spatial tension that defines our collective history as Americans. This film will be structured around my journey to tell a personal story of national significance. It is a film about being present in a corner of the American south that is often forgotten except in moments of spectacular violence. It speaks to intergenerational questions between the post-civil rights and civil rights generations. Rather than depicting black subjects as at the whim of violent forces, it is a document of the imparting of wisdom between generations of African Americans on how to survive not just materially, but spiritually.