In 2019 I drove to Maine with Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler for meetings with industry professionals at the Camden International Film Festival. We met with Noland Walker, Vice President of Content at ITVS, who had viewed some excerpts. Noland spoke candidly about the film’s shortcomings. He told me unless I made myself as vulnerable as Kafi and Carl had for me, the film would be “like every other film of its kind.”

I had first imagined Reckoning as an observational film. I conceived it as a year in the lives of students in the Clemente Course, a rigorous tuition-free night class in the humanities. I vowed to keep my distance and let the students tell their own stories. But long before we met with Noland, I’d been struggling with the film. My editing attempts, however focused, seemed to be leading nowhere. Despite several workshop screenings, I was at a loss.

On the ride back from Camden, Kafi asked me if I was afraid to enter into the film and make myself  truly vulnerable. Her words first chilled and then lit a fire under me.

Kafi formed a working group to help me develop my character voice. I collected my thoughts and started processing the consequential events I had witnessed over four years of filmmaking. There was the time Kafi had been evicted and invited me to Housing Court where dozens of poor people face eviction every week, most with no legal support. I accompanied her to an agency that had for weeks threatened to cut off her housing subsidy. But when we both showed up, two nervous white men took us to a conference room and told us the issue had been resolved in Kafi’s favor.

At another point, Carl’s landlord told him he would have to move out any day, as she was putting his space on the market as a condo. As a month-to-month tenant he had no recourse and as the primary caregiver for his young grandson, the prospect of an abrupt move was devastating.

Although I had planned to anchor the film in the personal transformations of the Clemente students, I came to realize ever-present structural racism was something I could no longer ignore. I’d been oblivious to the dark underside of beautiful, cosmopolitan Boston’s development boom and had failed to validate the lived experience of people I had grown to know as friends. I hadn’t really understood the lives of low-income people of color and had failed to recognize my own complicity in the structures that were holding them back.

Processing all this and entering into the film with my own character voice required patience, time and support from a team of people of color who had my back: Kafi, Carl, Noland, Llewellyn Smith and two friends of Kafi, Tolga Shields and Fernando Ona. Stepping back, there’s some irony in a white suburban filmmaker being encouraged to find and value his voice by people whose stories he had set out to mediate. I hope that is evident to viewers of A Reckoning in Boston.