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An Exploited Neighborhood, Seen Through Children’s Eyes
Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now tells the story of two childhood best friends in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project.
Dantrell Davis was walking to school with his mother in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood when he was killed in an act of random gun violence ( an actual event from October 1992 that We Grown Now integrates into its fictionalized narrative); either Malik or Eric could have been shot in the head, too, if they were in that place at that time. We Grown Now is clearly shaped by this history — its tone is a mixture of reverence for the refuge Cabrini-Green originally provided to Black Americans who moved north during the Great Migration to escape the oppression of Jim Crow, and sorrow for the way the city allowed the buildings to fall into disrepair. Instead, it unfolds primarily from the perspectives of its child protagonists, who experience their building’s decay through details like a leaky faucet that hasn’t been fixed in months (the steady drip-drip-drip of the water is an omnipresence in the film’s sound mix) and the city’s growing authoritarianism through an early-morning police raid and forcibly issued ID cards that they’re supposed to carry at all times.
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