Rooted

That we can see during the Facetime call that the wireless network is called Homesick is one of many small moments of craft in a film full of them. The package contains a letter, a mask. It might be an accident that as it's removed from the USPS box mailer a cotton-white packing peanut, extruded, expanded, dead, falls from the maw of that unstaring face. It's still in the film, a moment that in retrospect and with plenty of company would leave me as open-mouthed. In fine beaded rows are serried ranks of colour but it is in color-lines that Rooted finds incredible power.

The corridor outside the apartment is still, completely so, a static camera perpendicular to the door down that sterile hall. It will later be frenetic, panicked, rushing over the polished tile or linoleum. What is underfoot, the roots.

Sean Addo's film has supernatural elements but its quality is what will haunt me. There are so many notes in this story of musician Kay (Nican Robinson) and a fateful delivery that are pitched perfectly. The reference to Cherokee, moments of French, what might be a touch of Australia in the accent of girlfriend Sky (Riley Dandy), the sex and drugs and rock and roll, the everything. One of the things I love about short film is that like poetry or jewellery it can be small enough that every element can be felt in alignment, rhythm and facet and since all align in film cut and colour. Not a hair out of place, not a moment wasted.

It was in his New Yorker review of Black Panther that Jelani Cobb said - and I will quote it in full - that "The unspoken yield of this history is the possibility that the words “African” and “American” should not be joined by a hyphen but separated by an ellipsis." He wrote that in 2018 and I think of it (and the rest of the review) every time I consider Black Panther, still for me the only film that (so far, at least) leveraged the power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Trojan Horse for a story that asked actual questions of meaning and import and identity beyond "what if a guy but really small?" or "what if a guy but with a hammer?". Coogler's film did what science fiction can do at its best and asked a human question with a human solution caused and brought about by science, or at least the superhero-industrial complex and a magic rock.

I reference that because (fairly or otherwise) any film by a director with a Black identity that talks about race will be judged by a different lens. The comparisons with works like Get Out are at once easy and uneasy. I sit typing this in a city that grew rich from the slavery but at a remove that gives salve to conscience with only a bit of historical ignorance. Phrases like 'triangle trade' elide what Clyde ships were built for, and not only the latter steam vessels that broke blockades to trade with the Confedaracy. It was Paisley's Cart waters that turned the mills that span the eponymous fabric but the threads stretched to other places by bloody routes. From Glasgow's Jamaica Street you cross through to Tradeston in the shadow of the Kingston Bridge, from there can thread under and through concrete arteries to join the M8 to get to Paisley at a junction still called Plantation.

Unlike our protagonist I have not made use of one of these genetic identity services not only because of paranoia (though my worries are not as fearful as these outcomes) but because I have among the privileges afforded me a surety of my origins. I can and have stood in the places where my forebears have stood in the living memory that connects me to living memories passed but further and further than that, great upon great, centuries past. My relatives who crossed the Atlantic did so in circumstances that were difficult but they remained connected to their ancestry not at once shackled and cut free.

I mention these things because taking a moment and looking at detail is part of Rooted's richness, of its reward, of its cost. The search engine might be called "Net Wave" because this isn't quite reality and across LA any number of film-makers are looking for a way to reflect the internet (no longer capitalised) without making a dark bargain with something on the other side of a Black mirror. Though I checked and amongst other things it's also an ISP in Minnesota, a digital firm in Egypt. Each invites questions and comparisons about architecture, about effort. Gives us a chance to look at and through the mask.

Matthew Halla's cinematography helps us see but it is one of any number of things that makes us feel. The line drawings in dark blue of trees with ribonucleic stalks, hands contorted, lungs and ribs and faces eventually fade to the side and they become lightning-like tendrils on the periphery, but deep and fast and shocking is the film and I will not complain. Maxwell Shy Addo contributes music, part of a production where I cannot find fault.

There's a reference to 16mm dailies as confirmation that this is old-fashioned film-making and do not let the knowledge of Apple fool you - this is "old-fashioned" in the sense of "fashioned in the old ways". Before corporations we had a word or twelve for things that had some of the form of men that offered deals whose interpretation and outcome were predicated in the predatory. I was captivated, bound up, carried along, rapt. Open the door to Rooted, let it across your threshold, and you will be too. Rooted plants seeds that will grow to close cousins of strange fruit, bitter and sweet.

Rooted screened as part of the Fantasia international Film Festival.