“I’m just questioning: How real is the American Dream?” the filmmaker Adrian L. Burrell said. His new documentary, “The Game God(S),” seems to ask its viewers the same question. Watch here.
“I believe the American Dream is like a carrot,” the filmmaker said. “You can sail it out in front of people who were never meant to be citizens.”
Adrian L. Burrell’s film “The Game God” opens with a baptism. A man hums a mournful hymn to a tune reminiscent of a Negro spiritual. He’s accompanied by a Black band, dressed all in white, their sound rich in horns and world-weariness. Onscreen, a Black man and boy, also in white, march in slow step; the man’s suit is such a sharp, insistent shade that it seems to glow.
Burrell told me that the film’s title came from portrayals of hustler and pimp culture in Blaxploitation movies. Examples like “The Mack” and “Space Is the Place” were made or set in Oakland, where Burrell grew up, and where it’s common for people who make a living hustling in black-market economies—sex work, drug trafficking—to say phrases like “the Game God is going to bless you,” Burrell told me.
Burrell told me that his childhood was a “very colorful situation. A lot of people [I know] have been in prison.” He saw a way out with the Marine Corps. From there, he went to art school, then Stanford—a path representing his own pursuit of the American Dream. Then, in 2019, he became a victim of police brutality. A cop assaulted him on his own porch; Burrell recorded the incident as it happened, and is currently suing the. “It’s interesting how, in that sense, time isn’t linear,” he said.
“The Game God” is keenly aware of this precariousness of Black existence, and of the way that the past often makes appearances in the present. In her monologue, Nzinga lays a reference to modern-day men throwing dice alongside one to the 1923 Rosewood massacre, in which a white mob levelled a prospering Black neighborhood in Florida. “I wanted to create a meditation that forces us to hold history and its afterlives in the same vessel.
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