Set in and around Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing complex in 1992, writer-director Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now follows best friends Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), who were born and raised in the low-income housing project most people associate with its high crime and poverty rates. For the two boys, though, Cabrini-Green is neither abhorrent nor an aberration, but rather a self-contained world containing all their hopes and dreams, and which they leave only to walk to elementary school.
Told primarily from Malik’s point of view, the film delicately captures both the wonder and tunnel vision of adolescence, particularly through its depiction of the built-in defense mechanism that is his imagination. In the opening scene, Malik and Eric take an old mattress from an abandoned apartment and, after realizing the elevator is broken, drag it down several flights of stairs and outside, where they use it...
Told primarily from Malik’s point of view, the film delicately captures both the wonder and tunnel vision of adolescence, particularly through its depiction of the built-in defense mechanism that is his imagination. In the opening scene, Malik and Eric take an old mattress from an abandoned apartment and, after realizing the elevator is broken, drag it down several flights of stairs and outside, where they use it...
- 4/13/2024
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
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