Straight Outta Hunters Point by Kevin Epps

"Straight Outta Hunters Point", the award-winning Hip Hop documentary by Hunters Point filmmaker Kevin Epps is a stark cinematic portrait of a community struggling to stop the forces of gentrification -- denial of jobs, police brutality, environmental racism and more -- that have pushed 23 percent of San Francisco's Black population out of the City in the past decade. It has won the acclaim of critics and audiences at independent film festivals around the U.S., including Sundance and the Santa Fe Film Fest, where it was described as "a gritty, uncompromising film about the evolution and perseverance of a black culture in the shadow of poverty, race riots and gang-related rap wars."
Drive-bys, drug peddling and heavy dealing, hot rodding, gun toting, pimping, hustling and rapping - and young people can see very few paths out. "Once that culture is bred, it's prevalent," says Kevin Epps, who has called Hunters Point his home for 30 years.
Epps' film touches briefly on the period during World War II, when Hunters Point was the home of African American shipyard workers who migrated from the South with their families in search of better-paying jobs. After the war, when white men returned from the war front to take back their jobs, opportunities for blacks at the shipyard started to dwindle. The area soon became home to the city's poor, unemployed and unwanted.
The documentary leaves audiences with the taste of despair that churns in the bellies of most residents.
"We're numb to the situation because we've been there so long, even though you know it's not normal," Epps says. "I'm trying to communicate to people this is not normal and we can't accept it."
The result is a montage of voices: Mothers sob unable to reconcile their losses; friends and family celebrate another young life cut off too soon; evangelicals rush in to soothe and save souls. "Can I get with you in prayer," one missionary asks as the young man turns his back. Politicians declare at press conferences that the violence must stop. Police vow to stop it. All the while gangsters from both turfs explain themselves and the unapologetic ways of the streets.
"We have so many guns over here," Epps says. "AL47s. 223s.