We live in two Americas. This is a long-established fact in the United States, and it’s at the core of Adrian L. Burrell’s new film, The Game God(S), which premiered today via the New Yorker.
Across the film’s 17 minutes, Burrell, raised in Oakland, doesn’t dissect the myth of the American Dream so much as impart the visceral feeling of its central lie to the viewer. Throughout, Oakland poet laureate Ayodele Nzinga delivers a vivid monologue, as Burrell’s camera visits people who’ve made lives both in and out of the game—hustling, pimping, dealing—and navigating an alternate economy made necessary by American capitalism’s 400-year-old churn against Black people.
