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.
I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city that knows how to turn beautiful people into haunting memories. Everyone I know has lost someone to violence, whether it’s a brother, cousin, lover, friend. By middle school, the deaths started to stack up like a normality. A couple years ago, I was scrolling through Snapchat,when I saw a video clip a former classmate from elementary school had posted. It was a video of Dana, a boy from my middle school, who I used to have a crush on. He was funny and sweet in that annoying sixth-grade way, always cracking jokes and twisting his baby locs. Up until I saw that video, I had forgotten all about Dana. It’s so easy to forget people as you get older, I realise. I slid up on her story and asked about him, expressing to her I hadn’t seen Dana since sixth grade. She later responded, informing me that Dana had died years ago, while they both were still in high school. At the time it was 2 years after I had graduated from high school and was at the time a sophomore in college. I remember sitting there in disbelief. He was just a kid. It felt wrong how easily he had vanished from memory, how quietly he had passed away, and that I was finding out years later.
When I watched Drylongso, that same quiet ache came back seeing protagonist Pica Sullivan, a black woman in West Oakland, California who photographs the Black men in her neighborhood “as some kind of evidence of existence.” That sentence is the marrow of the whole film for me. Pica’s Polaroids are not pretty art objects; they are records, objects of insistence. They say I was here. I mattered. Someone remembers me. Pica cannot afford a 35mm camera, hence why she’s disconnected from the work she’s supposed to do in her photography class. She argues to her professor that her creative artistry is important to her and she took his class to express herself. She does not wait for permission, or go on searches to local galleries hoping to have a showing of her installation. She stages her own shrine in her own community, amongst her mother’s barbecues and porch, where people she knows can touch, laugh, weep, and remember photos of loved ones in their black community. That choice to make her art installation free and open to her community, neighbors, friends and loved ones, is one of the boldest acts of reclamation I’ve seen in film. It flips the script on who owns mourning. She’s offering her community a healing and reflective space without monetizing it. Watching Pica move through Oakland, documenting faces society cares to forget, I realized she was archiving the same kind of invisibility I'd seen with black youth in my own communities. Drylongso isn’t a movie about death, it’s about refusing to let your dead disappear.
Pica befriends a black woman named Tobi, who she meets after Tobi is physically attacked by her boyfriend near Pica’s house. Tobi’s character in relation to Pica begins to be this other fiber that holds the film together. They begin to watch out for each other. After Tobi is attacked, passing flyers on walls late at night, Tobi comes with her. While they both share the trauma of loss, it never becomes the glue to their friendship. I still think about Tobi’s line:
“You’re not afraid somebody’s gonna shoot you?” Pica asks.
“I was afraid of that when I was a girl,” Tobi replies.
It is adaptive brilliance and also a small compromise for her own survival and safety. Tobi’s fluidity reads less like performance and more like tactics for how she feels like she can protect herself. That intimacy between Pica and Tobi is not sexualized; it’s a mutual tending. When Pica and Tobi sit on the dock and casually share the number of funerals they’ve been to that year, the scene normalizes grief so that you stop expecting a melodramatic moment to explain it away. They glue flyers together on Pica’s floor, they count funerals like homework, they stitch together a household that the rest of the world won’t hold for them. It’s painful because the violence Tobi experiences is at the hands of a black man in her community. It reflects the same conversations happening within my community of domestic violence against black women. I do like the scene when a black man steps in Tobi’s denfense after he comes to her house harassing her. Smith does a good job with depicting serious themes without demonizing specific groups within the black community.
I loved the innocent relationship of Pica and Malik, an artist who recreates and sells shirts in the film . Malik bikes by ever so often in the film and asks Pica “when you gonna take my picture, girl?” I love seeing the small, shy intimacy of their connection. Pica hesitates, even though she really wants to talk his picture. She knows what a single image can mean; she knows that a Polaroid might be the only thing left of someone later. She’s waiting for “the right moment” ironically not realizing that time is a mere illusion, hence the reason she started her project. That line between love and fear is the core of why the film feels so devastating; every small romance carries the weight of possibility, someone you love could leave at any moment.
There is a serial killer in the film. The murders are not a crime procedural so much as a shadow that moves through the margins. Smith intercuts Pica’s slow, domestic rhythms with the news flicker on her grandmother’s television: a mounting tally, an anchor’s voice offering dry, bureaucratic grief. The killer is a plot device, sure, but he’s more importantly a way to make the film look at what the world notices. The world notices bodies only when they are sensationalized. Pica notices each one before the headlines do.
I too want this piece to be a preservation act. I want people I know and loved, the kids who disappeared from my yearbooks, to be recorded in words that insist on presence. I want Drylongso to sit in the same room as me when I talk about home, a film that understands the way small neighborhoods store epics. After watching the film I started being more upfront about wanting to take photos with my homeboys. I used to be afraid to be “that girl” wanting to document everything and being seen as not present, but documenting moments, I would argue, is how to become present! We should document black joy, our pain, our community events! Pica’s work: her photographs, her thoughtfulness, her refusal to let an entire cohort of lives become invisible is the film’s argument. It is an argument I hold now as an adult who has watched cities and names pile up. Watching Pica, Tobi, Malik on screen I feel my mother’s porch in Indianapolis, the creak of a neighbor’s screen door, the laughter of children on Brown Road. I think of the Sunday dinner with my Grandma, and late night sessions hot boxing with my homeboy. There is a domestic sound in Drylongso that makes grief feel less lonely. Smith understands that ordinary life is where resistance hides, and ordinary gestures are where we can keep ourselves. In the end, Drylongso is a tender manual on how to keep someone in the world once the world has already decided otherwise. Pica’s Polaroids teach me that resistance does not have to be angry and loud. Sometimes resistance is the slow, steady press of a camera button, the tap of glue on paper, the sharing of a sandwich on a front step. That labor is love. That labor is proof. That labor preserves the invisible.
I too want this piece to be a preservation act. I want people I know and loved—the kids who disappeared from my yearbooks—to be recorded in words that insist on presence. I want Drylongso to sit in the same room as me when I talk about home, a film that understands the way small neighborhoods store epics. Losing so many Black lives in Indianapolis, especially young Black men like Dana, made me realize that remembrance is a kind of protest. I started taking more photos, wanting to hold on to faces before the world could forget them. When I think of Drylongso, I also think of Nia Wilson, who was murdered in 2018 at the MacArthur BART station in Oakland—the same city where Pica wandered with her camera. That moment broke something open in the public conversation about how violence against Black women is seen and then quickly unseen. It reminded me that invisibility isn’t natural—it’s curated. The same silence that swallowed Dana in Indianapolis is the silence that tries to erase Nia, that tries to flatten grief into hashtags and headlines. Pica’s Polaroids refuse that flattening. Her lens turns mourning into memory, and memory into evidence. Watching Drylongso, I see what it means to keep someone alive by refusing to let them vanish. That is the labor of love. That is resistance. That is how we preserve the invisible.
