Night on the Town

A Philadelphia-based director's first feature film hits close to home.

by Sam Adams

BROTHERLY LOVE: Night Catches Us, starring Anthony Mackie and Kerry Washington, uses Philadelphia as its gritty urban backdrop.

Tanya Hamilton wasn't raised in Philadelphia. She wasn't even born in the U.S., emigrating from Jamaica with her mother when she was 6. But when it came time to shoot her first feature, Night Catches Us, the Northern Liberties resident was adamant about shooting in the city she's called home for the past decade.

The film's producers, not surprisingly, felt strongly about moving the production to New York, partly for tax reasons and partly out of sheer familiarity. But Hamilton knew the story, which stars Anthony Mackie as a Black Panther returning to his old neighborhood after years in self-imposed exile and Kerry Washington as a radical turned community activist, wouldn't play properly in a changed setting.

"There's a rawness here that doesn't exist in New York," Hamilton said early this week at a coffee shop near the home she shares with her husband and 4-year-old daughter. "Maybe Detroit. Because the poverty here is so pronounced, and there's a sort of economic segregation, I think there's an interesting connection with one's past." At Sundance, where the film premièred in January, she praised what she called the city's "blackety-blackness," the gritty, blue-collar quality that newcomers to Philadelphia learn to prize.

Hamilton spent more than a decade working on Night's script. She took a protean version to the Sundance Labs in 1999, and received a $50,000 grant from the Pew Foundation in 2004. The story and its characters changed shape many times over the years, the emphasis shifting from Mackie's damaged revolutionary to Washington's single mother as Hamilton became a mother herself. But she remained focused on the idea of "people coming home from a war," a quality that figures more literally in some of her other unproduced scripts.

The idea of what happens to combatants after political conflict peters out is one that has fascinated Hamilton since childhood. Her Jamaican mother, Hamilton says, has never had much use for U.S. politics, but when Hamilton was a child, worked for a time as a nanny to Carol Green. A Washington, D.C., woman who participated in freedom rides during the 1960s, Green was arrested for taking part in a White House sit-in protesting the police attacks on civil rights protesters in Alabama. By the time Hamilton met her, however, Green had become deeply disillusioned with political activism on a national scale, focusing her energies on grass-roots organizations like the House of Ruth, which provides housing for women and children struggling with domestic violence and drug addiction.

"It was this combination of being extremely jaded and extremely sentimental," Hamilton recalls of her "Aunt Carol," who remained a close friend until her death last year. "Her door was always open, which could be perilous. There was always someone on her couch, whether it was a person from Liberia or someone whose house burned down and needed a place to stay with their seven children."

When I ask whether Hamilton has ever considered herself a political radical, she responds with a laugh. "Not at all. It's absolutely pathetic. I give Obama $5 on his birthday. I volunteer for whatever campaign. I make phone calls. That's the contradiction I have to balance in my own personal life. I'm pathetically pedestrian, but as a filmmaker, whatever side of me makes me obsessed with Diane Rehm and the sport of politics says that if I make films, I want to make films that are true to the way I see the world and have some social relevance."

In Night Catches Us, the past is always present, as tangible as the Germantown houses where the film was shot, which Hamilton says required little modification to look as they did 30 years ago. ("I think we repainted the outside of Kerry's house, and that was it," she said at Sundance.) Behind the wallpaper in Washington's kitchen are bullet holes and bloodstains, reminders of a more violent time hidden just beneath the surface.

Also just beneath the surface is the city's long history of animosity between the police and the African-American community, a constant but unspoken presence. At the time the movie takes place, the memory of the day in 1970 when the police raided the Black Panthers' headquarters in North Philadelphia and forced several men to strip naked on the sidewalk would still have been a raw wound in the collective consciousness, continually salted by the authoritarian actions of Mayor Frank Rizzo, who was the police commissioner at the time of the Panther raid. Licensing issues thwarted Hamilton's attempts to weave stock footage of Rizzo into her narrative, but anyone with a cursory grasp of the city's history can fill in the background.

The city has changed in many ways since then, but some things remain the same. A scene in the movie in which a young black man is hassled by police for stealing bricks from a construction site was based on an incident Hamilton's husband witnessed in their neighborhood shortly after moving to the city. ("This was before it was fancytown," Hamilton adds.) Although the industry perception is that young African-Americans are only interested in multiplex fare, mainly so-called "urban" comedies and action movies, Hamilton describes visiting a Home Depot in the midst of production wearing the production's T-shirt, emblazoned with the likeness of Black Panther co-founder (and current Philly resident) Bobby Seale and having an excited young black woman run up to her as if she'd just spotted a major celebrity.

That, Hamilton says, is proof enough there's an audience for the film beyond the traditional art-house crowd, if only she can manage to reach them. "I guess conventional wisdom says you don't market a movie to someone who's black and 21, because you're never going to get that audience," Hamilton says. "And I'm not saying it's completely untrue. But it's a little like HBO in Spanish. Put it in their language and you'll get an audience."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Night Catches Us, Fri., Oct. 22, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.; Sat., Oct. 23, 12:30 p.m., Ritz Five, 214 Walnut St.; $12, 267-519-3214, filmadelphia.org.