Cauleen Smith’s feature debut “Drylongso, more than any other film I know, examines the physical space and toughened, often-ramshackle beauty of West Oakland. Smith thematizes the act of looking at the various spaces of Black Oakland through her protagonist Pica (Toby Smith), a photographer committed to the documentation of the most endangered urban species, the Black male, before his systematic elimination. Smith takes us from the upper-middle-class neighborhoods just off downtown to the run-down postindustrial zones of the port. In so doing, she generates inner-cityscapes whose rigorous depiction rivals the best of James Benning” (Michael Sicinski, Radical Light).

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