Days of Black and Yellow
2019 · 11m · United States
Directed by Lotfy Nathan, Willie Miesmer, Ray Levé
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Readings from the columns and suicide note of a New York black-car driver narrate a portrait of cab drivers being crushed by the rise of rideshare apps.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make another gig-economy-destroys-working-people essay, but at least this one has the spine to let a dead man's words do the talking instead of newscaster hand-wringing—though honestly, found-text narration feels like the safe way out of actually taking a stance.
The decision to structure the entire film around a cab driver's own writing—his columns and final note—situates this firmly in the lineage of essay cinema where source material becomes form itself, recalling Marker and Farocki; it's a formally rigorous approach to a subject that could've been merely sympathetic.
The choice to layer the driver's own voice and words over the collective portraiture of other cabbies creates an intimate specificity that transforms what could be broad social critique into something devastatingly personal—that single decision makes the whole thing breathe.
Reviews
Directors Lotfy Nathan, Willie Miesmer, and Ray Levé provide a vivid encapsulation of a vital contemporary labor issue in under ten minutes. Schifter's words, distorted through a ghostlike recording, conjure a grim picture of labor under assault by an under-regulated competitor.
Festivals
- Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2019
- Grierson Awards 2020, Shortlisted