Advertisement
PRESENTED ON 35MM! This May, The Black Nerds spotlight I Like It Like That, a vibrant and layered portrait of the South Bronx that refuses to be simplified.
There’s a tendency, especially in mainstream cinema, to treat “the hood” as a monolith. But if films like Boyz n the Hood opened a door, then I Like It Like That kicks it wider, insisting on the specificity, texture, and multiplicity of Black and Afro-Latino life in New York City.
Lisette Linares, played by Lauren Vélez, is a young Afro-Latina mother in the South Bronx holding it all together while her husband Chino is incarcerated. As she navigates work, family, and temptation on all sides, she steps into a new world through a job at a record label, forcing her to confront love, ambition, and the limits placed on her by both circumstance and community.
When Darnell Martin premiered her debut at the Cannes Film Festival, she made history as the first Black woman to direct a major studio film. More importantly, she gave us a South Bronx that feels lived in and deeply familiar.
What some might call chaos or dysfunction reads differently when you recognize it. The hallways, the corner stores, the music spilling into summer nights, the rhythm of the block. It feels like home. The film finds beauty in that texture and refuses to clean it up.
Watching it now, especially after Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, hits in a new way. Miles Morales became a portal to a New York that many overlook, but Martin was already doing that work. While Spike Lee captured Brooklyn, this film made space for the Bronx and the people who shaped it before gentrification rewrote the story.
Inside that world, the film also holds quiet conversations about identity, colorism, and proximity to whiteness. The hierarchies manufactured within our own communities. The subtle comments at family functions, the dynamics in relationships, the things we are taught and unlearning in real time. It does not announce these tensions, it lets them live.
Misunderstood on release, the film still stands as a vital portrait of a community in full. Complex, contradictory, and deeply human.
Join The Black Nerds at the Revue Cinema this May for a field trip to the Bronx in the 90s. Tickets are available at revuecinema.ca
-Faduma Gure
Advertisement
Event Venue
Revue Cinema, 400 Roncesvalles Avenue,Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Tickets
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
