I was born and raised in LeDroit Park, a neighborhood whose sights, people, and dynamics shaped my person. Over the years, I’ve watched that neighborhood shift under the weight of gentrification. The feeling of becoming unmoored and foreign in my hometown has been devastating. This film is my response to that pain—a motion picture homage to Black Washington, DC, and the people who built it and me.

This work is a montage of portraits and poetry, woven together to create a living time capsule. It is an act of preservation. The faces and voices in this film are fragments of a history that deserves to be remembered and a present that refuses to be erased.

I made this piece to honor the community that raised me and to hold space for its stories before they are paved over. It is my love letter to a neighborhood, a city, and a culture under pressure, but never silent.

Eliamani Ismail is a writer and filmmaker from Washington, D.C.