The heart of Chris Dean, the main character in the short film As I Am, stopped beating when he was two years old. The doctors had given up. But God brought him back. At five, Chris’s father was killed by 20 bullets on the very street the boy walked every day.

As I Am opens with a tall Black young man walking across an old, rickety overpass. Darkness surrounds him. He pauses amid the diverging rail tracks. A voice, heavy with despair, speaks: “Picture your dream. Look at where you came from, where you’re headed, and what you’ve been through…” Then Chris shares his dream—a dream choked by screams, water splashing wildly from somewhere, rowdy Black youths, and thick, overgrown streets.

The image that repeats most is Chris’s hands. Hands dipping into a puddle to wash clean, hands stretched out under sunlight, crisscrossed with scars. The streets of Memphis teem with drugs, shouts, curses, fights, prostitutes, and lonely old folks trying to rebuild the barriers the kids keep tearing down. Chris gets to go to school, lands a job to survive, but in that chaotic society, he’s lost. He’s lost amid the tangled tracks before him, streets that lead only to dense bushes. Pain lingers constant on the long road he’s walked for 18 years.

shouldn’t be here. In a blank state.
In a city with no fight. In a house with no lights.
This state shouldn’t be my life.

***

I can see the stress in his walk. I can hear the pain in his voice. His finger’s itching.
You can’t sell him a dream. He’s not a dreamer. He’s a thinker and a doer.

I had to pause the frame where a legless woman drags herself up the stairs. She doesn’t stop—she