S. Epatha Merkerson

We Grown Now follows Malik and Eric, two young boys and best friends, navigating life in the infamous, crime-infested Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992 Chicago. They have desires and dreams and wisdom beyond their years as they try to spread their wings to soar above their mundane existence until a tragedy shakes the community, puts their parents on edge and changes their lives forever. We Grown Now is courageous and encouraging.

In a time known as 1990s Chicago; in a place called Cabrini-Green, a pair of peach-colored curtains, imprinted with a mosaic pattern, undulate in the wind. The curtains, as a pair, seem as inseparable as our young friends Malik and Eric. But no pair is immune from being swept apart. This is the story of We Grown Now — of a friendship as strong as kin. Two boys and their families are caught in the crossfires of crimes born of scarcity and America’s wars on crime, drugs, anything… Like so many innocent poor people before and after. But We Grown Now is also a poetic reminiscence on the community that once infused America’s most iconic housing project, the great migration from Mississippi to Chicago, and love in its many mercurial forms.

The most striking element of We Grown Now outside of the outstanding actors including the young Blake Cameron James (Malik) and Gian Knight Ramirez (Eric) starring as two young friends growing up in the Cabrini Green public housing projects in 1990’s Chicago, is the extreme care and poetic take that director and writer Minhal Baig delivers. Despite growing up in Chicago she didn’t have first hand knowledge of the Cabrini Green community but knew enough of the racist, classist and oppressive history and the fear many had of going near the government housing project riddled with violence, including the story of real life Dantrell Davis, a young child who was shot on his way to school which rocked the community in 1992.

Director Minhal Baig does a beautiful job of creating a sense of time and place from a child’s point of view, and uses the story of the boys’ friendship to illustrate the history, from the Great Migration from the South to Chicago that took place a generation earlier, to the rising violence, the War On Drugs, Mayor Daly’s policies and ultimately the fall of public housing. The performances are excellent, especially from the boys, who movingly convey the universal bond of childhood friendship – inseparable friends until circumstances pull them apart.