“Memory is a selection of images, some elusive…others printed indelibly on the brain,” opens Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 film Eve’s Bayou. The Baptiste family’s Southern estate rests on a Louisiana bayou named after their ancestor Eve, which has been passed down through generations. The film, set in the 1960s, masterfully weaves a complex vision of family, memory, and home as the matriarchal Baptises grapple with a secret threatening to tear them apart. Plunging into the interiority of 10-year-old Eve (Jurnee Smollett), Lemmons’s southern gothic masterwork is grounded by the search for belonging and truth in the wake Eve’s loss of childhood naiveté through a kaleidoscopic lens of heartache, longing, and being. In Eve’s Bayou, home is the site of memory.
Crooklyn (1994), directed by Spike Lee
Spike Lee’s Crooklyn is a cinematic memoir that captures the textures of Black life in the 1970s, radiating with the possibilities that love offers. Unfolding in Bed-Stuy, on Brooklyn’s famous brownstone-lined streets, Crooklyn captures the genuine warmth from the neighborhood and its eccentricities. Cowritten by Spike Lee’s sister Joie Lee, Crooklyn is a slice-of-life drama that embodies the attitude, tonality, and vision of its protagonist, 10-year-old Troy, in Lee’s signature freewheeling style. Lee’s homage to the warmth of Black homes is layered with filmic celebrations of family dinners, bickering between siblings, and the foundational ties that bind us together. In Lee’s Crooklyn, the brownstone stoop in the heart of Bed-Stuy is a stage to see the world—and the family’s love—unfold.