’17 Blocks’: Film Review
In “17 Blocks,” Cheryl Sanford, matriarch of a low-income African American household in southeast Washington, D.C., talks wistfully of a “parallel universe” where she and her family enjoy cookouts, vacations and gift-filled Christmas mornings. This melancholy confession comes moments after a closeup of her casually snorting cocaine. It’s a heartbreaking scene in that have destroyed the future, and often claimed the lives, of too many African Americans in poor communities. Though it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and was subsequently released by MTV Documentary Films last October, Davy Rothbart’s intimate and uncompromising documentary speaks even more directly to this moment and an America convulsing in protest over racial inequality.In 1999, Rothbart (more recently a contributor to public radio’s “This American Life”) met 9-year-old Emmanuel Sanford-Durant and his teenage brother Smurf during a pickup basketball game. Rothbart befriended the pair and provided them with a video ...