How to Raise a Black Boy
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Justice Jamal Jones
Genres: drama, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
After their father vanishes, a young boy and his sibling are moved to a remote woodland house where their mother teaches them to make, build, and dream. As more parents disappear and more children arrive, the sanctuary becomes a refuge that may not hold.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most shorts about disappeared fathers settle for sad piano. Jones builds an actual mythology in the woods — that's a different ambition, and I respect it.
Jones treats Black childhood as fairytale architecture — a self-contained mythology of disappearance, craft, and collective parenting. Beasts of the Southern Wild lineage with its own register; ambitious in a way I'd want to verify.
Treating Black childhood as fairytale architecture — disappeared parents, woodland refuge, mother teaching them to make and build and dream — is a brave mythopoetic move. The sanctuary-that-may-not-hold structure honors the subject without flattening it.
Reviews
An imaginative, free-spirited fairytale about love, secrets, and breaking away — a rich collage lifted with powerful images and a self-assured vision.