Field Niggas (Khalik Allah, 2015): USA

Reviewed by Joshua Borja. Viewed at AFI Fest 2015.

Khalik Allah takes the audience to Harlem, the intersection of 125th and Lexington, to be more specific, to show us what the life is like.

It might be important to address the elephant in the room for this film: its title. At first I was on board with Allah’s vision, properly calling it, “Field Niggas.” However, I found myself lowering my voice, as I knew the stigma that comes with the slur. I even noticed a worked at the box office addressing the film as, “Field ‘N-word’s.”

My first impressions of the film were that it felt much like a dream, or a haze. Two key elements to film’s production lead to this feeling, cinematography and the sound.These may seem as if that’s very broad. Like, duh. What you see and what you hear is the whole film, right? No. It was specifically how the film was shot and edited and the key decision of asynchronous sound that led to this effect.

The entire film is shot in slow motion. The film is also entirely close ups of people’s faces, the subjects almost always looking directly in the camera. The combination of the two make the audience feel a personal intimacy with the subjects. All of this was intentional. To add to the hazy effect, the focus will fade in and out of our subjects’ faces.

As mentioned earlier, the sounds in this film is asynchronous. As the camera cuts to a new face, the sound behind it will be snippets of conversation or just letting the audio of Allah’s conversation with that person. The entire experience of hearing people talk with seeing mouths move was almost jarring.

Khalik Allah sent the audience of AFI Fest a message to watch before seeing his film. In it, he explains that the film is not intended to be political, but more spiritual. It really shows in this interesting film, that I would recommend people to see if they are interested to see what a Harlem native calls home.