‘All These Sons’ Review: Bing Liu’s ‘Minding The Gap’ Follow-Up Is A Compassionate Portrait Of The Battle Against Gun Violence [Tribeca]
By Hoai-Tran Bui/June 22, 2021 9:00 am EST
All These Sons, which Liu co-directs with his Minding the Gap collaborator Joshua Altman, is a powerful, if slightly by-the-numbers, documentary that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to an issue as deep-rooted and devastating as gun violence in Chicago. The problems have already been well-documented by many others, to a more extensive degree. So Liu and Altman decide to go a route that had worked for them before with Minding the Gap: the intensely personal.
The film follows a handful of Black men under the guidance of the IMAN (Inner City Muslim Action Network) and MAAFA Redemption Project organizations, two religious community groups dedicated to rehabilitating ex-convicts and former gang members. There’s Zay, who’s dealing with PTSD from getting shot soon after joining IMAN; Charles, fighting against a legal system that has written him off; and Shamont Slaughter, the closest thing to a “main character” of the piece, whose engaging personality and sympathetic plight of preparing to raise a child with his girlfriend in his gang-divided neighborhood keep the audience — and several members of the IMAN and MAAFA — invested in him even as he frequently backslides into the cycles of violence that everyone is trapped in.
But they’re all trying to break the cycle, even the founders of these organizations who desperately try to help and rehabilitate the young men. At IMAN, Billy Moore hopes to atone for the mistakes of his youth by helping others avoid that path to prison, where he spent 20 years for killing Chicago-area basketball star Ben Wilson in 1984. Moore and MAAFA leader Marshall Hatch Jr., the son of a local pastor, both know where those paths can lead and try their best to change as many lives as they can in small ways.
“I felt like I was in a movie,” one of the men remarks dreamily after a night of carefree partying in D.C. The next day, the dream continues in a visit to the historically Black college, Howard University, where for the first time, the young men see a future for themselves that doesn’t end in a jail cell or a bullet. It’s a turning point for the men, and for the film. But it doesn’t offer all the easy answers, as Shamont still struggles with his dedication to self-betterment long after the trip.
All These Sons falls short of Liu’s tremendous documentary feature debut, but shows that the Minding the Gap filmmaker is capable of tackling a complicated and knotty subject with the same kind of laser-focused intimacy that he showed in his first autobiographical outing. There may be a distance to All These Sons, but its clear-eyed compassion makes it a solid and effective follow-up./Film Rating: 7 out of 10
