Chicago’s infamous housing project, Cabrini-Green, is the perilous setting for intimate early-90s period piece We Grown Now. Renewing the coming of age roots she planted in her debut feature Hala, writer-director Minhal Baig captures two Black kids navigating systemic racism, brutal policing and broken promises, while imagining an unlikely better life. An unassuming character study set to poetic rhythms makes for an empathetic study of Black life, full of resolve. This evocative coming of age film premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Centerpiece section. ed by a mostly unknown cast, the film’s crowd-pleasing sentiments should be a boom for indie lovers.

Taking place in autumn 1992, We Grown Now begins with a view down a dilapidated hallway as the distant sounds of hip hop, ing cars, and squeaky sneakers colour the scene. Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) enter the frame dragging a stained, cream hued mattress. The young boys pull the pad to a playground where other mattresses are splayed out, the kids jumping on them in an activity they call flying. Oblique images — girls hula hooping, stretched out shadows of jump roping, immersive close-ups of Malik’s face dappled by sunshine, intercut with him floating in the air – and composer Jay Wadley’s dulcet strings gently repeating recalls the lyrical opening montage of Joe Tablot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

An ebullient, jocular kid, Malik loves telling his hardworking mother Dolores (Jurnee Smollett) corny jokes. “How do birds keep cool,” he asks. “Bird-conditioning.” Dolores is a doting mother; she works long hours as an ant, taking home meagre pay to Malik, her daughter and the matriarchal heart of the family, Anita (a sage S Epatha Merkerson). They occupy a modest apartment in Cabrini-Green, filled with sunlight and warmth yet surrounded on the outside by danger. [full review via Screen Daily]