Bush Mama

In Bush Mama, Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima tracks the experiences of Dorothy (Barbara O. Jones), a Black mother living in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, as she grapples with the imprisonment of her Vietnam vet husband and navigates the bureaucratic tangles of public assistance. Her world is rendered with an unflinching neorealist lens, but these scenes are also teamed with formally experimental dispatches from Dorothy’s turbulent inner life. She finds herself in overwhelming circumstances, yet talk of liberation buzzes all around her, a response to relentless police violence and capitalist exploitation. Bush Mama, through its fractured, captivating drama of political awakening, showed us Los Angeles as Hollywood never had.