“ Government cheese '' remains outside the beaten track with a black surrealist family

When Paul Hunter began to shop around his script for an autobiographical film entitled “Government Cheese”, about a black family living a surreal life in the San Fernando Valley in the late 1960s, he kept obtaining variations on the same rejection: we do not know noirs like that. These are not black characters that we have never seen. “I said to myself,” guy, it's my family, “recalls Hunter recently. “There is a whole side of the culture you don't know.” “”

Finally, Hunter, who made clips for musical artists as diverse as LL Cool J, Lauryn Hill, Marilyn Manson and Deftones, transformed the “Government Cheese” into a short, with David Oyelowo (“Selma»). And now, it's a series, presenting on Apple TV + Wednesday, where apparently nothing is too imaginative and there (see: “Breakup»). A vision of the pastel birth valley, with symmetrical visual compositions in a vein Wes Anderson and a non -traditional stress of history “,”Government cheese“, Created by Hunter and Aeysha Carr, easily suits Hunter's artistic imperative:” What I have always tried to do, as a storyteller and as a creative, is not put in a box. »»

The “Government Cheese” box would have a most unusual shape. Oyelowo plays the role of Hampton Chambers, fresh out of Chino state prison after making a chew fraud offer. Back in his spacious house in a large sunny street, Hampton awaits a happy welcome. He does not get it. His wife, Astoria (Simone Missick), has freshly lit ambitions for a career in interior design. His youngest son, Harrison (Jahi Di'allo Winston), is sullen and full of resentment. His older and budding genius appropriately named Einstein (Evan Ellison), applies to colleges, but he seems more interested in perfecting his pole jump technique. While the notorious Great hit once, things have changed.

But Hampton has a dream. He invented an auto -hhaning exercise – the magician bit! – And it is impatient to sell it to an aerospace company on the road. He also has other criminal crosses to wear. He owes money to a family of local French Canadian crimes, and his former racing boyfriend, Bootsy (Bokeem Woodbine), wants him to help steal the local Jewish temple. There is also the question of a giant catfish that carries a belly of biblical implications.

Hunter has put a large part of his imagination in the “government cheese”, but also a large part of his life story. His father went to prison and returned to a new strange world when he came out. Hunter grew up in the valley and in the bay region, and he sold cutting tools for an aerospace company. Like Harrison, the youngest son of Chambers, he was deeply in love with Amerindian culture; In the series, Harrison sees one of his father's condemned friends, Rudy (Adam Beach), as a mentor – the character is based on one of the neighbors of Hunter Valley, a man of Apache also named Rudy.

At a deeper level, however, Hunter wanted to transmit what it is to be a black family that challenges expectations and lives in a sort of bubble, cut off from radical cultural currents of the time.

“When I grew up in the early 1970s, there were a lot with the Black Panthers and all this kind of thing,” he said. “My family has not really focused on this kind of thing. We just stayed in our own world. ”

Paul Hunter said that he wanted “government cheese” to transmit what is to be part of a black family, like his, who challenges the wait: “We just stayed in our own world.”

(Apple)

He compared the characters to the Addams family. “It is this group of people in their own world, and I wanted to express the feeling of being different from what people thought as we should be, especially as blacks,” he added.

Oyelowo, also an executive producer, has a ready-made description: “It is an absurd parabolic surreal family comedy,” he said in an interview. (“David has a lot of words”, joked Carr in a separate interview.) In an episode, while Astoria looks at a commercial coffee typical of the time, the housewife on the television appears in the family house of Chambers. Astoria offers a criticism of the domestic submission of the coffee woman. “Coffee is a metaphor to take care of your husband,” replies the unexpected visitor.

Carr, who was also a writer and producer on “The Carmichael Show“, Was struck by Hunter's instinct for bringing written ideas to visual life.” I come from this place to be a writer and to be invested in history and character, “she said.” He really opened my eyes to the way of telling more visually stories. He's just a very visually beautiful human.

Hunter previously led a functionality, “Ball test monk“(2003), which he found unsatisfactory.” I was quite young, and I didn't really have a voice in it, “he said. He made his name with clips and advertisements, including a Venerated Nike Spot, “freestyle”, which skillfully mixes the rhythms of basketball and hip-hop. But he continued to think in images on the big screen, even when he had the chance to do “government cheese” for the small screen.

“We have 10 episodes, and I thought we might make them as short films and make them connect in an interesting way,” he said. He found an inspiration on the colors on the old Polaroid photographs: “The way the sun rises in the valley, it wash the buildings. All the painting fades.”

In real life, government cheese was the name of a transformed cheese given to low -income Americans, food banks and schools thanks to a program started in the 1950s. This can mean poverty, but, as Oyelowo points out, this can also suggest ingenuity, the ability to create and improvise something new and unexpected.

If that describes Hampton Chambers, he also describes Paul Hunter.