17 Blocks (2024)

17 Blocks

“17 Blocks” is a documentary that centers on a family in Washington, D.C. for 20 years and it is so agonizingly emotional that at certain points you may have to brace yourself to get through the most difficult moments of the film. Unlike how this might sound badly toward the quality of movie production or its truthfulness concerning actual events, it is only an indication that in this household, as demonstrated here and mentioned by a preacher later in the story who invokes Job during a funeral service, there are sufferings comparable to those of Job with no light at the end of tunnel seen until after long time during which very little is seen.

“17 Blocks” covers from the late 1990s into late 2018, taking us from September 11, 2001 to our present day. Basically, much has been said about how close the American seat of federal power is vis-à-vis black predominantly working class/poor neighborhoods associated with Washington D.C (until gentrification began pricing them out and increasing white populations).

However none of these nonfiction features were as plain as this one when it comes to showing ironies and contrasts. “17 Blocks” focuses on a mother, her children, and her grandchildren. All are affected directly or indirectly by drug abuse (within their families and also in their community) as well as by gun violence which never seems far away from any place where there are low level dealers regardless of race.

The story opens during the mid-aughts with Cheryl Sanford coming home after many years to visit her late father’s house where she raised three children; Emmanuel as her oldest child then “Smurf,” finally followed by Denise who was youngest among them. Cheryl’s speech patterns and body movement are clear indicators she is on drugs (later we learn it was cocaine which she normally used plus other substances), while earliest flashbacks (assuming 1999) show she has been an addict for her whole adult life.

She also blames herself for Smurf’s drug use and even his decision to quit school at 15 and start dealing. All of the many years that are sincerely accumulated and highly distressing were full of self-blame as well as self-flagellation, none of which meant much against ongoing addiction with its collateral damage.

This is the first scene that opens the documentary and allusions, which flash forward to say something horrible is going to happen to them. It is even worse than you had anticipated. In fact, a brief sequence of a member of this family wiping off blood stains literally his own mess represents one of the most distressing cases in life when the universe gives someone a metaphor

However, this is nothing else but storytelling; a mere sleight of hand using images and sounds. Of course, we know that there are people struggling with addiction matters; families continue this habit from one generation to another since addiction results from an inherited character rather than moral weakness or poor upbringing; at times mourners just pay impromptu visits without caution and out of nowhere; finally, these tragic events cannot be held as inevitable actions considering that they happened within one family they were actually foretold, surviving did not mean deserving it or sowing what they riped for because surely new directions can be strategically charted with determination and some luck (as we see at last for the Sanford, thank God though it’s been long).

Davy Rothbart directed, produced, and supervised “17 Blocks” while Jennifer Tiexiera also assisted as considered by her writing credit on a nonfiction project which was unusual in providing coherence through editing pieces from over 1,000 hours of video according to Rothbart himself. The power of its visuals cannot be overstated. They always move yet hardly try to be beautiful (usually). And even though one does not see overt signs of growth on screen e.g. changes in seasons/shifting fashions/hair-styles/music etc., the very change in image format underscores the passage (or slipping) of time from one generation into another.

The whole thing started in 1999 when Rothbart met Emanuel Sanford together with Smurf during a pickup basketball game near their house and began visiting their home. He began shooting them at some point and leaving his camera in their weekender’s house. Soon after, the Sanford started using it to record their own lives. And what’s more amazing is how much candidness can be found in footage pulled from that early phase of history Emmanuel in particular treated the camcorder as a journaling pad in form of an apparatus: a device that could easily be turned on to capture any fleeting or memorable moment.

In order to protect her family against misinterpretations, including Cheryl’s own, “17 Blocks” doesn’t challenge reactionary, puritanical, maybe even racist interpretations of the Sanford family’s misery as it probably should have. Her addiction is something that she often blames all terrible things happening to her family but only at a much later stage do we realize that her addiction did not just start out of nowhere: it was pretty clearly one way she was medicating herself after having been raped by a group of boys as an adolescent girl. And one of the movie’s virtues, its compactness, is often a liability. It divorces the family’s suffering from social and political context.

Most times you should just guess about the wider implications of racism, de facto segregation, financial “redlining,” and anonymous military style police occupations of Black neighborhoods (rumbling helicopters and flashing red and blue lights are a constant) on families like the Sanfords. Steve James and Stanley Nelson could be mentioned as two filmmakers who often tell stories about Black families and yet they do manage to weave it all into stories which are no less concerned with emotions; thus that idea is not entirely impossible to execute.

This however, is by far an absorbing and frequently extraordinary movie. In some instances it appears as a documentary like version of a sprawling Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” or Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” but this time we see black children from the inner city instead of white ones from suburbs whose lives unfold in front of our eyes. And not simply characters moving through time but families grappling with transformations: in communities; within households; on their own faces when they look into mirrors and at photographs.

Several poignant motifs involve repeating actions or dialogues at different stages in the family’s life a mother or one of her children remarking on her looks in photos from previous eras, an adult asking a child to say what he/she wishes to become OR describe things they dread. There is also some horror movie aspect somewhere here which must be well known to anyone who has ever belonged to, or have seen, an addicted family: as soon as oneself grows old enough for using/abusing, one starts wondering about the repetition cycle.

Some of the hardest scenes in “17 Blocks” come courtesy of footage taken by kids themselves or Cheryl showing how substance abuse affects their family’s everyday existence such as yelling matches between mom and her sons/daughter, mom fighting with her boyfriend; drinking liquor while smoking marijuana cigars at their mother’s home when they were little enough for “child” entry fees; mom on her knees searching for a lost stash.

But most of the pictures merely show Black working class urban America in the late 20th and early 20th centuries: the hangouts and cookouts, the pranks and games, the meals and nightcaps, the quiet moments when adults and children are just sitting around thinking, listening to music, playing games, napping. The stuff days are made of.

Cheryl Sanford is listed as one of executive producers on this movie, and her bio says that she has been clean for a long time now and works as a community activist , among other things. Thus it seems that she wanted all this to be seen by us hence she insisted that Rothbart together with her relatives began taping it many years back. After all, there’s solace in knowing that something so beautiful could come from whatever it was they went through. At least others could see it since their story was narrated.

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