Bush Mama

The film tells the story of Dorothy and her husband T.C. He is a soldier back from Vietnam who expected to be met as a hero; instead he is arrested and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Her life passes in the queue at the welfare office, in a neighbourhood struggling with poverty and unemployment. What happens makes both of them political, and in the end Dorothy turns to violence. The film comes from the independent Black cinema that grew in Los Angeles in the seventies; rather than building a tidy plot the account weaves documentary footage, inner voice and fiction together. Barbara O. Jones plays the lead in Haile Gerima’s ninety seven minute American film, completed in 1979.