Straight outta film school

San Francisco filmmaker Kevin Epps presents a new angle on the American ghetto

Review by Dustin Stephens
Film Review Archive

      As a cultural institution, San Francisco is saddled with several sets of reputations to uphold: from urban bohemianism as first envisioned by the beats to a responsibility as the capital of homosexuality in America, from laid-back Northern Californian je ne sais quoi to a refuge for liberalism in a wealthy metropolis in an increasingly conservative state. But with the notable exception of Oakland, the inner-city life of low-income minorities does not factor heavily into this composite, despite the size and racial diversity of the greater Bay Area.

      Homespun San Francisco filmmaker Kevin Epps’ inner-city documentary Straight Outta Hunters Point aims to change that sort of under-representation. His gritty first film represents a new and promising trend in independent production: low-budget digital creations that document lives which were previously ignored—or in the filmmaker’s estimation, completely unseen.

      “Everybody knows about ghettos like Brooklyn and Watts, but they think San Fran is just straight faggots and white folks,” says Epps, no stranger to in-your-face abrasiveness. “No one even knows about HP (Hunters Point), but it’s a real ghetto right here in San Francisco.” 

      Indeed, within the two years of his film’s production, there were over 100 shootings in the Hunters Point area—most over the hierarchy of rival rap labels such as Big Block and Black Power Records. Part of the problem is that despite hordes of talented rappers, Hunters Point has yet to have an artist achieve mainstream success, though it has had plenty of close calls. And the competition to be that first big breakthrough is felt with intense—and often violent—results.

      As for his own breakthrough, Epps credits San Francisco’s Film Arts Foundation for introducing him to the medium in the first place. He and co-producer/editor Joshua Callaghan, a Berkeley resident, met at the school, and Epps picked up most of his skills as well as financial support from the foundation, not to mention a barrage of adulation including a jury award from the San Francisco Black Film Festival.            

      At a recent screening of SOHP on Haight Street, San Francisco’s cultural downtown back in its heyday, Epps and his sizable Hunters Point entourage encountered a sold-out audience consisting of a largely white, idealistic bourgeoisie eager for a cultural dialogue with African-Americans. Whether they got that or not at this screening is up for debate. This was a crowd divided almost bitterly between those who live in Hunters Point and those who view it as a cultural phenomenon at once intriguing and distressing. The tension was manifest, but not without an undercurrent of tacit respect.

      In the end, SOHP lived up to its growing reputation as a thoroughly compelling and impressive debut production. The best moments present an even balance between reasoned historical perspective on one hand (charting Hunter Points decay from a hopeful collection of public housing projects to a devastated rioting ground in the 60s and in the words of a current city council member, “a civic problem”) and jarring present-day violence on the other. The latter scenes represent cinema verité in its rawest form; one memorable sequence finds cameraman Epps first on the scene of a drive-by shooting. He somehow manages to keep filming as he calls for help. It is more than understandable when this incredible and unpalatable sequence comes to an end as ambulances and grieving residents begin to gather at the scene.

      Fortunately, the film is not without its lighter moments, such as the many scenes of cars carving smoke-filled donuts in parking lots, lots of extemporaneous rapping, and local residents openly smoking pot and amicably harassing police officers. The street performances of random characters like Saleem, Hunters Point’s self-proclaimed first rapper—“the original nigga in town—I ain’t doin’ no fucking around”—are downright hilarious. Some residents lament that 3^rd Street, once HP’s busiest thoroughfare, is now a depressed avenue “infested with Korean and Arabian owners”; others proclaim that “pimpin’ and sellin’ dope is a gift, a talent” that beats working for six bucks an hour to get the bills paid

      Nonetheless, later scenes portray locals in a more positive light, at the same time voicing the hopelessness they feel in ever escaping life in the ghetto. But there remains a sense of defiant pride in many of the film’s characters, or as one outspoken teenage girl puts it, “I live in the hood, but the hood don’t live in me.”

      After thirty years in “HP,” Epps knows this microcosm intimately and feels he has earned the right to act as its cultural delegate. In light of the objectivity, thorough research, and stylish technique of his documentary, most viewers would probably agree, including residents of his own fiercely confrontational neighborhood. At times Epps comes off like a war correspondent documenting a long, bitter dispute in a foreign land. The fact that this land exists only a few miles from the deluxe seating of Haight Ashbury makes his film all the more significant.

      In SOHP, Epps is capturing a setting most audiences never visit except when forced to, and never think about until the latest pop representation of the ghetto appears on NYPD Blue or Law and Order. It is a place that for most Americans has begun to exist merely as a stage for dramatic myth-making, or as Epps portrays it, a third-world country we would do well to learn from. Importantly, though, he is not an artist lamenting the dearth of solutions; in fact he is a long-time counselor for the non-profit Hunters Point Youth Parks Foundation, the type of grassroots after-school group he insists is crucial for keeping kids from dealing drugs and circumventing the resulting cycle of violence, and each screening of SOHP benefits the organization.

      “What Hunters Point needs is a dialogue,” Epps says, in fitting with the hopeful, conciliatory tone of his film’s conclusion. “People need to take these problems on themselves—each individual improving themselves and what it means to live here. It’s not so complex like that, you know what I’m saying?”

      Yet the American ghetto continues to exist, even to grow in some form or another in almost every major metropolitan area. To some this situation seems hopeless and easily ignored, but to idealists like Epps, there is enough hope and value in the inner city to warrant the struggle to revive it. And in a media-saturated culture, the fact that this struggle has taken on a form that is both well-researched and stylishly produced—a film about the ghetto from within the ghetto—can be taken as nothing less than a sign of great hope.

Straight Outta Hunters Point made its East Coast debut at this summer’s New York Black Film Festival.