There is something deeply intimate and quite unsettling about returning to a film that has outlived entire versions of yourself, which is exactly what I found myself doing this past weekend when I went to the theater with a group of friends to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Moonlight, one of the greatest films of the 21st century. Any opportunity I get to talk about Moonlight, I seize the moment, to the point my friends know how much certain films mean to me. It’s kinda my love language to ask, “hey you wanna come to the local cinema with me, and pregame at the theater bar,” because I hate company. For me, getting the opportunity to see Moonlight in theaters felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to get to see a film that changed history, and in my opinion introduced a lot of people to A24 (before they went lame).

My mom was the first person to put me on Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988). She was a student at Spelman College when Spike Lee was holding open auditions. She told me how she stood in line that felt endless before stepping out, convinced she wouldn’t get picked. Years later, she admitted it was one of her biggest regrets. “Spike didn’t pick the trendy girls,” she once said, “he picked the real ones: everyday women, BLACK skin, natural hair.” That always stuck with me. I remember watching the film at a young age, but the topics of elitism, colorism, and misogyny went right over my head as I hadn’t yet experienced enough to grasp such nuanced understanding of intraracial relationships. I just knew how uncomfortable I felt when Julian asked Jane to sleep with Half-Pint to “prove her love” and how Half-Pint’s excitement to tell Dap later ignited that unforgettable “Wake Up!” moment.

I’ve never seen an independent Black film quite like Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998). The Criterion restoration in 2022 finally gave it the audience it deserved, but for me, the film felt like it was speaking directly to a particular kind of listener, the ones who recognize the small, private language of grief and survival that everyone is uncomfortable to talk about, let alone based a film around. The word drylongso, a Gullah word (derived from the American American Vernacular English aka AAVE), holds a double meaning: ordinary; and worn-out, beat down by hard times. That double meaning is the film’s fiber especially centering around black womanhood in a coming of age drama. It’s everything I know about being an (un)ordinary awkward black girl and being a tired one, all at once.