Going Forward
2018 · 15m · United States
Directed by Tim Harris
Genres: biography, documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, tender
An election-day portrait of Malcolm Kenyatta campaigning to become Pennsylvania's first openly gay Black state representative.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a doc about a historic candidate to genuflect—Harris just *watches*, lets the mundane campaign machinery and Kenyatta's quiet confidence exist without uplift, which somehow makes it more radical than any obvious statement could.
The film sits within a lineage of intimate political portraiture (think Pennebaker, Wiseman's restraint) and executes that grammar flawlessly—the editing knows when to linger, when to cut, when to let silence do the arguing.
Harris makes the entire film turn on a single compositional choice: keeping Kenyatta often in frame with others, never isolated as subject, which reframes the whole premise from biography-as-hero-narrative into something about community and presence.
Reviews
A fantastic portrait of third-generation activist, Malcolm Kenyatta, directed by Tim Harris of Philadelphia-based Seven Knots Productions. Our goal as filmmakers was to capture the day as purely as possible in order to show viewers what election day is like for a lower-level candidate campaigning in a district that's desperate for a solution.