17 Blocks: review

Premiering at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where it picked up the Award for Best Editing in a Documentary Feature Film, Davy Rothbart’s 17 Blocks is a compelling, two-decades-long look at the Sanford-Durants, an African-American family navigating the ups and downs of daily, low-income life in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol – just 17 blocks away from our nation’s halls of power to be precise. The film’s main cast of characters includes Cheryl Sanford, the strong-willed matriarch who grew up middle-class in a neighborhood nearby; her college-bound son Emmanuel Durant, Jr., who began the whole documenting process as an inquisitive nine-year-old with a home video camera back in 1999; Denice Sanford-Durant, who serves as the family’s grounding force even as Cheryl’s drug addiction spirals out of control; and Akil “Smurf” Sanford, who unfortunately follows in his mother’s footsteps, using drugs and ultimately dealing them.

While the film is an undeniably moving and powerful portrait of the inner-city disadvantaged overcoming obstacles and rising above urban blight adversity, it is also problematically tidy, nearly cliché. Rothbart, the film’s Emmy Award-winning director – and a contributor to This American Life – is notably not from the neighborhood he chronicles. He first met a 15-year-old Smurf and his budding filmmaker brother Emmanuel on a public basketball court only by chance, then soon befriended the entire clan. Rothbart, not incidentally, is white.

To read my review visit Global Comment.