Start the week with a film: ‘Nickel Boys’ erases the distance between character and viewer

RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys uses an inventive technique to reveal just how deeply felt racism is. The Oscar-nominated film deploys a first-person approach, in which the experiences of two Black teenagers in 1960s America are seen entirely through their point of view.

The effect is achieved by strapping cameras to the adolescents. Although initially jarring, the device gives a vivid sense of not just how discrimination is experienced, but how it is felt too.

Nickel Boys is based on the acclaimed Colson Whitehead novel of the same name. RaMell Ross’s screenplay, written along with Joslyn Barnes, goes beyond conventional adaptation, erasing the distance between character and viewer.

We see Elwood’s world as he sees it – tough but loving too, challenging but equally fulfilling. In the classroom, Elwood’s teacher reminds students of the Civil Rights movement raging outside. Elwood’s grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is proud that he will be leaving home for a technical school.

Elwood (Ethan Herisse) never gets there, instead landing up in the Nickel Academy reform school. His crime: he took a lift from the wrong Black man.

At Nickel Academy, the perspective expands to include Turner (Brandon Wilson). The film alternates between these two teenagers. Through their interactions, we see each of them as the other sees them as…

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