Drylongso (1998)

Drylongso" is an old African American term that means "ordinary, " or "just the same old thing. " Ambitious and densely packed, Cauleen Smith's remarkable debut feature addresses the everydayness of violence and the extraordinary beauty of daily life. Pica is a young woman growing up in Oakland, California, who feels deeply the value and vulnerability of everyone's life but her own.

At home, her room is perpetually violated by her mother's partying visitors, and her work in illegal poster distribution puts her in nightly danger of attack. At school, she is unable to make any progress on her 35 mm photography project. Instead, armed with charming savvy and a Polaroid camera, Pica tirelessly documents the existence of young black men, whom she believes to be an endangered species. Along the way, she snaps a photo of Tobi, a young black woman, disguised as a man, who is running from a violent boyfriend. Tobi discovers that her assumed gender gives her new strength and freedom of movement around the city. Pica is able to explore not only the lives of people around her but examine how they choose to define themselves. Tobi's character emerges as an interesting examination on what it means to be 'male'. While her choice to dress like a man comes out of an abusive situation, where she is powerless as a woman, she soon finds that male clothing has the ability to act as a site of power. In this way, she seems to be taking advantage of the very patriarchal system that placed her in a space of little power. This idea of how to define "masculinity" in conversation with femininity is further complicated by Pica's desire to photograph the African American male. Fate, however, does not spare Pica's boyfriend, Malik, and his death inspires her to turn the rampant casual violence into something transcendently beautiful through her art. Full of irony and inspired by the lyrics and rhythms of hip-hop music, Drylongso breathes fresh air into popular notions of black culture. If black men are endangered, black women are still safer when they dress as black men. Shot on a shoestring budget, Drylongso is a filmmaking triumph which tells a story that needs to be heard.