#336: Slippin’: Ten Years with the Bloods

Release Date: April 22nd, 2005

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Joachim Schroeder and Tommy Sowards

Directed by: Joachim Schroeder and Tommy Sowards

2 Stars

Point a camera at young men who are angry, uneducated, and traumatized and you’ll probably capture something compelling. Joachim Schroeder and Tommy Sowards’ documentary Slippin’: Ten Years with the Bloods is proof. 

They capture moments that are equal parts heartbreaking, pathetic, and upsetting. 

The problem with the doc is that it doesn’t have much of a thesis. Schroeder and Sowards, who are white outsiders to the community they’re documenting, export these images with little authorial presence. Slippin’ also doesn’t work particularly well as a chronicle, either; the gang members are unnatural and too performative when on camera, especially the doc’s narrator, “Low Down” Lemar, who is the least charismatic of the crew.

There are elements that work here, though. Slippin’ is an excellent snapshot of a time and place, and of a community left behind. It’s here that many young black men choose a color, either red or blue, that decides their identity and their beliefs, the personal touchstones that they never had the opportunity to discover through school or a proper upbringing.

So what if they die? According to these Bloods, at least they have a reason to live.