Rochester film festival confronts sexuality, racial issues with stirring documentary

Out in the Night is about violence––where it begins, what it looks like, how it happens and the stories that we tell about it. Screened on Oct. 11 at the Little Theater in Rochester as part of the city’s LGBT film and video festival ImageOut, Out in the Night is an incredibly powerful documentary by director and producer Blair Doroshwalther. Out in the Night tells the story of the “New Jersey Four,” a group of young, black lesbian women from New Jersey who were harshly convicted for defending themselves against a targeted attack that took place in New York City in August 2006.

The film deals with the ways in which misogyny, homophobia and racism function together as forces of oppression and emphasizes the necessity of working simultaneously against all three. Labeled a “gang assault” by the justice system and “Attack of the Killer Lesbians” by the media, the story of the “New Jersey Four” challenges the idea of living in a post-racial, colorblind society.

While the media and the trial focused solely on the violence of that one night, the film takes a nuanced look at the various forms of violence within the case. The film examines the violence of gay-bashing and sexual harassment that happens daily even in supposed “gay-friendly” cities and neighborhoods. In addition, it depicts the violence of a culture that routinely criminalizes the bodies and existences of LGBTQ-plus people and people of color and the violence of a legal system that sentenced “New Jersey Four” member Renata Hill to more prison time than the man who serially raped her as a child.

After watching the film, all confidence in the ability of the criminal justice system to sort through all these layers of violence disappears. Instead, the film asks us to consider the possibility of community-based alternatives to policing and incarceration.

Out in the Night also explores the complex terrain of self-defense. It discusses who is granted the right to self-defense and who, as activist and writer Mariame Kaba puts it, is seen as having “no selves to defend.” In the film, activist and scholar Angela Davis argues, “You either ascent to the homophobia of everyday culture, or you figure out a way to speak out, to resist.”

At the ImageOut screening, three out of the four who were convicted—Renata Hill, Terrain Dandridge and Patreese Johnson—were in attendance and fielded questions from the audience. They discussed their lives after prison and possible steps forward in combating the injustices that they and other LGBTQ-plus individuals experience.

Although the film ends with a reduction in their sentences and a release from prison, the fact remains that these women spent several years of their lives behind bars and continue to face difficulty in finding employment because of their criminal records. They may be out of prison, but they are not entirely free.

Awarded with the Special Documentary Jury Prize for Courage in Storytelling by ImageOut, Out in the Night is a moving and essential film. Although difficult and potentially triggering to watch, this film’s story is one that needs to be told.

Futuristic novel examines climate change

Chang-rae Lee’s new post-apocalyptic, post-climate change novel On Such a Full Sea is told in a voice thick with accumulated nostalgia and melancholy. The story takes place in the ashes of apocalypse; in the wake of climate change, water contamination, swine and bird flu epidemics and urban decay. It exhibits a wistfulness for a “prehistoric world, when the air was drier and clearer and more temperate,” along with a mournful longing for foreclosed utopias, lost origins and distant homes.

Sliding between the past conditional (“she would have”) and the future perfect tense (“we will have”), the novel’s present feels equally pregnant with the dashed dreams of the past and the narrowing possibilities of the future.

In the world of On Such a Full Sea, history has circled back on itself; Lee’s dystopian future begins to resemble our own present. America has been recolonized by climate change refugees pushed out of “New China” by pollution.

Brought to blighted, abandoned cities to work for giant corporations, the first settlers – the “originals” – have created close-knit and stable communities such as B-Mor (previously Baltimore) almost from scratch.  These communities are rooted in family, work and self-abnegation. In a sense, climate change has offered the promise of a clean slate; the possibility of a from-the-ground-up sort of technocratic utopia.

The intervening 100 years, though, have seen the rigid stratification of America (now, the Association) into archipelagos of exclusion and inequality and the decline of the utopian promises of the originals.

By the time we get to it, B-Mor is a community that has begun to see the limits of its devotion to work ethic, self-sacrifice and respectable politics. It has begun to find holes in its unqualified progress narratives, its state-sponsored histories, textbooks and museums. B-Mor, then, is a community aware of its own end and preservation: “We can’t help but envision what may well come.”

Spoken by a “we” to a plural “you,” the story is related in the unified voice of an entire community. It has an oral and extemporized quality to it – almost as if it has been told many times before and will be told many times to come.

There is a tension between the murmured mantras of “It is fine” or “It is right” and the creeping awareness that “deformations have appeared on the surface of our serene terra.” This narrative technique lends the story a quality of distance, a skein of mystery.

Barely perceptible behind this skein of mystery are the outlines of a character: the novel’s (mostly) silent heroine, Fan. Fan is constantly transacted and animalized by the story’s other characters and the novel itself. The book relies on her smallness and her silence; on both her prophet-like qualities and her lack of agency.

The first-person plural narrator speaks through and for Fan. Fan is the canvas onto which the B-Mor community projects its collective anxieties and fantasies, more a fetish object than a real person. This weakness speaks to a larger weakness – an inability to complicate the predictably noir-ish, masculinist tropes of dystopia fiction – on the part of what is otherwise an incredibly relevant meditation on themes of immigration, climate change, memory and community.