African Film Festival 2012 - Barry Jenkins

Leave it to a Florida-by-way-of-L.A. transplant to make arguably the definitive film about contemporary San Francisco, and about being young, hip, and African American in a city that seems to only have room for the first two. Barry Jenkins's debut film chronicles the "day after" a one-night stand as two hipsters (Tracey Heggins and The Daily Show's Wyatt Cenac) struggle to find more in common than their race. A trip to the Museum of the African Diaspora, in a city emptying itself of blackness, serves as a final counterpoint to their banter on personal and political identity. Medicine's airy black-and-white photography refreshingly draws from the French New Wave's romanticism, and Rohmer's Moral Tales especially, with its similar focus on urbane city dwellers trying to sway (and lay) one another through verbal seduction (and destruction).

—Jason Sanders

• Written by Jenkins. Photographed by James Laxton. With Wyatt Cenac, Tracey Heggins. (90 mins, B&W, DigiBeta, From IFC)