Writer and Director: Daniel Glenn-Barbour
Daniel Glenn-Barbour’s new docudrama Ain’t Hidin Nuttin is all about the cost of dreaming big when you are from the wrong kind of neighbourhood. Screening at the Rio Cinema. Dalston, this film premiere blends talking heads and dramatisation to tell the story of a group of friends hoping to make it on the grime scene but are pushed into crime, drugs and gang violence to help them on the road to stardom, while their older selves reflect on whether any of it was worth it.
With plans for a recording career, Keyz just needs to get the money together for a studio session and with few options, a local drug dealer offers him the chance to sell. With his friends Jay, Trigger (Sadaaq Said) and Zeek (Ezekiel Panzo) increasingly drawn into this dangerous world, things soon escalate, as territorial battles and turf warfare pits old school friends and family against one another with life-altering consequences for everyone involved.
Ain’t Hidin Nuttin is a highly reflective film mixing straightforward narrative drama taking place in chronological order with retrospective post-event commentary from the men whose lives are depicted. Building on a limited series, it is an approach that works very well, constructing the overarching story clearly while also taking time to consider those events as they unfold, putting them into a broader context of the individual’s lives, thought process and family obligations at the time to explain their motivation. It also allows those affected in their wider circle including girlfriends and siblings an opportunity to expand the film’s points of view, adding to the grounded and emotional implications of the choices the individuals make.
The acted sections are principally built around friends Keyz and Jay whose trajectories quickly diverge despite being on the same path and involved with similar people, with Jay embracing the power that violence and a feeling of being untouchable brings. And the film sets up the contrasting purpose of the friends well as they become respectively willing and unwillingly drawn deeper into this world and cannot escape.
Glenn-Barbour also thinks about consequences in the short and long term, understanding how characters feel in the moment as well as during the fictionalised period of the drama and much later as their true selves look back. But it could do more of that while thinking about neighbourhood status, parental and peer examples and social political pressures placed on young Black men in places with few opportunities and even fewer role models. What is the answer to breaking the cycles of violence, prison and pre-determination that Glenn-Barbour portrays when all these young men want is a chance at a way out.
Performed by Keon Martin-Phillip as Keyz and Jason Brown as Jay, the acting is occasionally a little stilted but that is often the nature of docu-drama format. Ain’t Hidin Nuttin does however build emotional connection and investment in its lead character, along with a clear understanding that external factors can overwhelm even the purest of dreams, especially when your options are limited right from the start.
Ain’t Hidin Nuttin premiers at Rio Cinema, Dalston on 19th August produced by 4Deuce Films.
