Damani Baker On How His Personal Journey Inspired 'The House on Coco Road' [Interview]

Photo courtesy of 'The House on Coco Road'.

Filmmaker Damani Baker speaks with Okayplayer as he recalls his idyllic experiences that inspired his fascinating documentary, The House on Coco Road.

The House on Coco Road is a fascinating, intimate documentary that blends the personal and political. Using archival news footage, home movies shot by his family members, and film he shot in Grenada fresh out of graduate school, filmmaker Damani Baker (Still Bill) examines the time he spent in Grenada before, during, and after the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 1983.

The House on Coco Road, which is the 16th film acquired by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY distribution company, traces the story of the women who shaped Baker’s life while connecting it to the other related threads in history: the Great Migration, the Black Power Movement, and Maurice Bishop’s vision of a socialist government in a majority Black country before it was undermined by the U.S. government.

Baker graciously took the time to speak to Okayplayer about his film and the personal journey that led him to create it.

Photo courtesy of 'The House on Coco Road'.

Okayplayer: One of the things that really stood out to me in this film was seeing the Super 8 footage of your great-grandmother and grandmother. It’s amazing and rare to see something like that. Who shot that and preserved that?

Damani Baker: My grandfather, grandmother and a couple of uncles passed the camera around. At the screenings I joke that they deserve director of photography and cinematography credits because that box that you hear about in the movie has hours and hours of Super 8 footage. And it was never projected. It was as if they shot it and then put it in a box. It really documents my entire family’s story from the 1950s to the 1970s. This one black family in the South was documenting their truth. And it’s fascinating and when I found it, I freaked out because it was the missing link to the Grenada project. It’s priceless in a world of migration stories. To see a family pack up and move was mind blowing.

A lot of families don’t like to talk about the hard stuff... one of the questions I have is why do we suppress a lot of those stories? It’s a treasure trove. It helps us figure out our own way now and the way forward.

OKP: I was curious as to how you were able to coax those more difficult stories out of your mother and her associates?

DB: When I started this project I was just out of grad school and I hadn’t produced a feature of this size. I think I had to grow as a filmmaker and as a person and I had to make space for my family. We’re telling stories and making art about real people who are living and present as we speak. The coaxing was about making space for them. I feel lucky and blessed that I grew up around mentors like my mom and Fania Davis and Angela Davis and Erica Huggins and a long list of women change-makers who worked incredibly hard to provide as much as they could for my sister and my family and I. So I think that broke down a certain barrier. But I had to really take my time and be patient and allow them to tell their story on their terms.

It requires a certain level of patience and forgiveness and honesty to really allow this cast to be truthful in their own life experiences. I didn’t want to take advantage of their trust. I made Still Bill which was an incredible lesson in patience and persistence. Someone asked me a similar question about interviewing Bill Withers and it’s this kind of combination of humility and passion and confidence. You love what they have to offer, it’s a gift and you need the humility because you’re sitting across from your mom and Angela and Grenada revolutionaries and equally brilliant people who didn’t fall into traditional leadership roles.

OKP: This was one of the few films about the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement that really centered the women doing the work and organizing. How did it affect you to grow up around women in positions of power and leadership?

DB: The best part is that you don’t always necessarily know that’s what’s happening. Growing up with women activists and women leaders in my life became—not second nature—but you recognize it as what the world should and can be. This was part of what I understood as reality. Seeing women in positions of power in a country with beautiful people who looked like us was incredible. That was the new norm. Education and health care were priorities and rights. As a child to grow up around this brilliant cast of powerful and profoundly creative women and to see another version of that in the Diaspora was transformative. And it had a huge impact on who I am today because I did imagine those things as how we should be living. Like, why wouldn’t we be living that way? Why would healthcare be a debate at all?

OKP: That’s exactly what I thought. Of course healthcare is a right, of course education is a right, of course everyone has affordable housing. Why is it a question?

DB: Why is this a conversation at all? Which speaks to larger and complicated issues about humanity where everything has become negotiable. We’ve allowed certain things to be more important than taking care of your family and your neighbor too. If your neighbor is well, you are well.

OKP: I thought it was interesting that you put all these threads in one story, rather than make separate documentaries. What made you want to tie them all in together?

DB: I was conscious of not overwhelming people. I sat down with my editor for a year to figure out how to connect everything. It was impossible not to look back and reflect on that. COINTELPRO is in there, Imperialism is in there, the Cold War is in there, which is really a part of imperialism. I couldn’t look at my family’s story without looking at these other things. This is an amazing opportunity to connect the dots for a lot of people. Some people who have been living for that entire period, some of the elders, have watched the film and said, “Yes, my life has been connected to these bits of history.” That’s been heartwarming and a real joy to hear that.

In Brooklyn there was a screening at BAM and there was a huge Caribbean community that came out, the Grenadian community, and African-American Brooklyn families were in the audiences too. And during the Q&A—which can often go on as long as the film—someone raised their hand and said the African American community and Caribbean community, we share a wall and a brownstone and an apartment but I watched this film and realized we’re on similar paths. I see our journey on similar path and I hadn’t considered my Caribbean experience being related to the black American experience. I saw myself and saw my neighbor in a new way and I see that we’re connected.

OKP: What was the most rewarding part of making this film and what was the most difficult part?

DB: I’ll start with the difficult part. Working on something that doesn’t have obvious commercial value is really hard. We had 600 Kickstarter supporters and Sundance Lab support. That is a hard piece in making films but then the other hard part once you get over that, is that there’s a deep family story here so I had to be sensitive to my mom’s needs and my extended family’s needs. I didn’t want to be the filmmaker who puts his mom on blast. It’s not so much hardship but a level of sensitivity that I had to keep in mind.

The upside is right now. We’ve been touring on the festival circuit and now it’s going to be on Netflix. It’s going to reach audiences I never imagined and it is a gratifying feeling. That’s rewarding and I could have never imagined it.

OKP: Hearing the audio of that letter you wrote when you were nine during the chaos and turmoil happening in Grenada [among them the assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and bombings led by the U.S.] was heartbreaking. What was that like going back as an adult and reading that?

DB: That letter speaks to my mother’s understanding of oral history and being an educator. During that time she documented everything and knew there was value in me expressing myself in that way. I’m so grateful that she did that... in a way that was part of her understanding children and we were part of her research; she has a masters in early childhood education. She just had the vision and knew that could be transformative and part of our healing later. It took me back to that moment of hiding under our bed and wondering if we were going to make it out. Contemplating mortality based on circumstances that were not our own...so I’m grateful that my mom kept a lot of that stuff.

OKP: Angela Davis in the film said in the film that “we have to find something that holds a promise.” We’re back to fighting a lot of the same battles right now. So what have you found a promise in, within all of that?

DB: My son is in the film because there are lessons to be learned from him and how he’s processing the world at the age of six. I’m hopeful. Even Fania [Davis, Angela Davis’s sister] talked about a migration of the mind, of the heart towards something that can be beautiful.

As hard and as painful as pieces of my Grenada story are for me and my family, there’s a lot hope. I have not given up on humanity. We can do better and we will do better. We don’t have a choice. And so that’s what I hold onto. As what Angela and Fania and my mom say, there is a promise in progress. And that we are slowly—and sometimes fast when we need to—chipping away at things that don’t work towards a more sustainable and equitable planet. I believe it.

The House on Coco Road is currently available on Netflix. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Danielle A. Scruggs is a Chicago-based photographer and writer who runs the website Black Women Directors and is also the Director of Photography at the Chicago Reader, an award-winning alt-weekly newspaper. Follow her on Twitter at @dascruggs and view her site at daniellescruggs.com.