From Omeleto.
A man defends his home.
In 1929, Bill and Marie are a Black couple who have managed against almost overwhelming odds to achieve a significant milestone of the American dream: they own their own home. But when a railroad is set to be built on top of their land, the government attempts to force them out of their home.
Marie is resigned to the circumstances, but Bill is more stubborn. When the official overseeing the transaction comes to confront Bill, Bill must choose between leaving his wife and baby or protecting his house and legacy.
Directed and written by Noel Paganotti, this short drama is a narrative of conviction, one held quietly at first, until it digs in its heels and becomes clamorous and rattling. The film has a visual elegance and stateliness that suits its story’s historical provenance, but in its painstaking build-up of one face-to-face encounter, it peels back the layers of civility and politesse to reveal the ugliness of discrimination, the hollowness of the American dream and the struggle of one man to let go of a hard-won symbol.
The visual storytelling evokes an almost old-fashioned classicism, with its measured pacing, careful blocking, and painterly compositions evoking the feeling of an intimate stage play. Warm tones wash over the frame, framing Bill’s lovely home in soft light and domestic calm. The home is cozy, rich and warm, and it’s easy to see why Bill will fight so hard to keep it. The visual warmth suggests comfort and safety, but those associations are quickly upended when Curtis, the official charged with getting Bill to sign off on the removal of his home from the land, enters the picture, bringing with him a venal energy to his negotiations with Bill and Marie.
At first, Marie is polite and conciliatory with Curtis, but Bill proves rude and intransigent with the official. As Bill, actor Nachbi Lacossiere conveys Bill’s coiled resentment and anger, which only grows as he goes up against Curtis’s thinly veiled disdain, played by actor David Warpness with a brittle veneer of gentlemanly civility. But that facade can’t hold, and underneath the supposed serenity is a more corrosive truth about how entrenched bigotry, attitudes and hatred can be, even as it’s hidden under policy, paperwork and politeness.
Graceful, composed, and quietly devastating, AN IDEAL OF LIBERTY turns riveting as the tension between Curtis and the couple builds, igniting into a violent confrontation. The clash at the center of the film — seemingly civil, almost polite — slowly reveals itself as the latest iteration of a much older battle over power and property, a modern iteration of a system that methodically denied families generational wealth, security, and belonging. It reminds us that injustice rarely announces itself with dramatic force at first. It often perpetuates itself in measured tones, in contracts and covenants, in gestures disguised as normalcy — until the leverage and might of one party comes bearing down on the other in full force.
AN IDEAL OF LIBERTY. Courtesy of Noel Paganotti at https://instagram.com/anidealoflibertyfilm.
