Night Catches Us

This underappreciated masterpiece by director Tanya Hamilton is an attempt to deal with issues of memory and history shortly after the end of the civil rights struggle. The film takes place in the post-soul era; 1976 is a placid moment after an extremely contentious decade, but the economy is tanking and civil rights movements are floundering. By boldly choosing her protagonists to be anonymous Black Power activists, the director avoids the pathos and myth building to which civil rights leaders are often subjected to on-screen. The film's protagonist is 10-year-old Iris and her mother, Patricia, once a radical member of the Black Panther party. It is from the girl's perspective that we observe the unexpected and disruptive return of her mother's friend and unfulfilled love from her revolutionary days, after years of absence. Marcus turns the lives of the mother and daughter upside down by evoking the ghosts of the past. One way to see the film is as a metaphor for the decay of a community caused by the denied and unsettled accounts of the Black Power movement. "Slate" called the film, [o]ne of the more promising debuts in recent American cinema.