Falling into a deep depression following the breakup of his marriage, Oakland musician Damon Jamal “Dame Drummer” Taylor felt despondent over not providing his two children with the nuclear family he had longed for while growing up.
Peering into the abyss, he realized that “there are two people who will not understand if you do something to harm yourself. Once that message was revealed to me, I started moving forward and healing,” he told The Chronicle. “I’ve been in my children’s life since they were born, and that’s what helped me — that and my faith in God.”
So, even with his life careening, he decided he needed to reconfigure the treacherous racial narrative that seemed to undermine his role as a father. Channeling his pain into creative expression, Taylor set out to commune with other Black men about the experience of fatherhood. The result is “Black Daddy: The Movie,” a hybrid documentary that celebrates Black men who doggedly maintain a steady presence in the lives of their children.
The film’s first Bay Area screenings take place Sunday, June 19, at the Regal Jack London in Oakland and, as part of the San Francisco Black Film Festival, at the SF Standard Salon.
“Any man can father a child, but it takes a real man to raise one,” is the tagline of the film, which has been building momentum by winning awards at Black film festivals around the country, including best documentary honors at the Queens Underground Film Festival in New York and the Tampa Bay Black Art & Film Festival in Florida. With a mix of reportage, music videos and observational footage, “Black Daddy” focuses on a group of East Bay men, mostly musicians, including Kev Choice, Michael Austin, Mike Blankenship and Kevin Allen.
Though Taylor has produced his own music videos, “Black Daddy” is his first outing as a filmmaker, and the project gave him the impetus to gather his friends and colleagues for a Pacifica retreat that provides one of the movie’s central threads. Discussing their relationships with their own fathers and their feelings about raising children of their own, they clearly treasure the opportunity to let their guard down.
“We’re not afforded spaces to get together as men and talk about issues that are very sensitive, like relationships with our fathers,” Taylor said. “I wanted to shed some light on that and help make it popular for these conversations to be happening all over the place. Images of vulnerability of Black men in America are almost nonexistent.”
The film covers a lot of ground, with few punches pulled. The musical interludes are woven into the narrative flow, providing space amid the intense emotions and deepening the connection to the men. After Oakland educator and musician Karega Bailey’s devastating account of giving away the car seat and crib intended for a baby lost in childbirth, he and Taylor conduct a soulful hip-hop communion that’s full of grace.
The men talk about the toll of custody battles and long-distance parenting. Choice describes the challenges of staying close to his geographically dispersed kids, delivering a freestyle retort to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” one of pop music’s searing portraits of fatherhood in absentia. “Child on East Coast, child on West Coast,” he raps. “Papa was a rollin’ stone? More like a rock steady.”
出生并成长在克利夫兰,泰勒搬到Oakland in 2012 and has become a vital force on the Bay Area scene working with leading artists such as Martin Luther, Fantastic Negrito, Aisha Fukushima, Zion-I, Los Rakas, Liv Warfield and Black London, the powerhouse East Bay jazz and R&B combo with Choice, Blankenship and Howard Wiley. His interest in filmmaking is inextricably tied to an early musical epiphany.
“When I saw ‘Purple Rain’ as a kid, I knew I wanted to make movies,” he said, citing Prince’s 1984 film that — perhaps not coincidentally — also centered on conflicted fatherhood.
Like many documentaries that rely heavily on observational footage, “Black Daddy” was structured in the editing process. Taylor worked closely with Salvatore Fullmore, a well-traveled Oakland filmmaker and editor who has collaborated with artists such as Nicki Minaj, Wiz Khalifa, MC Hammer and E-40. His own complex journey informed the story he helped Taylor shape, from reconciling with his father after insistently following his cinematic muse to the years he spent navigating a stepparent relationship with a girlfriend’s children.
“We were really trying to explore many different branches of the experience,” said Fullmore, who is slated to be on hand with Taylor for a discussion on the film after its Oakland screening. “Some people had fathers in the house, or a friend who had both parents who served as role models. I think for all these men the end goal is to give their child or children a better experience than they had.”
“Black Daddy: The Movie”:San Francisco Black Film Festival screening at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 19. $30. SF Standard Salon, 2505 Mariposa St., S.F.www.sfbff.org/films; 6 p.m. Sunday. $10-$25. Regal Jack London, 100 Washington St., Oakland.www.eventbrite.com.