“A Reckoning in Boston,” a new documentary film that focuses on two Dorchester residents enrolled in a night course at Codman Square Health Center, will make its debut at the Independent Film Festival of Boston today (Thurs., May 6). 

Director James Rutenbeck initially expected to make a film about the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a free educational experience offered in Codman Square for adults facing economic hardship and adverse circumstances. But over the course of filming for five years, Rutenbeck decided to bring two participants in the course, Kafi Dixon and Carl Chandler, aboard as producers/subjects in the film.

As it moves from classroom discussions to community meetings and rallies around affordable housing and social justice, the documentary shines a light on Boston’s deep, sometimes ignored inequalities and the activists working to resolve them.

Dixon, 50, has worked as a gravedigger, fishmonger, MBTA bus driver, and a community activist over the years, but mainly she considers herself a farmer. When she enrolled in the Clemente Course, she was in the early stages of forming The Common Good Co-op, an urban farm and cooperative for working-class women of color in Dorchester’s Four Corners neighborhood. After first seeking out a technical writing course, Dixon soon discovered that the humanities subject matter in the Clemente Course was informing the work of her organization.

“Two years into seeking municipal support and organizational support around the co-op, I was coming face to face with some of the structural and systemic issues around community design and experiencing some of the class issues around proposing community development,” she explained.
“James came in around the time I was having my own personal reckoning around what it would take for lower resource women to put this project up on legs... At the Clemente Course once or twice a week, in thinking about what we were learning about history and philosophy, I was better informed about importance of work I was doing. It affirmed the work I was doing, gave me a second breath.”

Chandler, 72, was contemplating his next steps after his youngest daughter left home for college when he noticed a flyer advertising the Clemente Course. Looking back now, he describes the night course as the “best learning experience I’ve had.”

At first wary of Rutenbeck’s camera crew and reluctant to be seen or heard on film, Chandler said, he eventually grew to ignore the filmmakers and embrace the project as a way to thank the Clemente Course and leave a legacy for his children and grandchildren.

Soon, as Chandler, Dixon, and Rutenbeck grew to know each other, the perspective of the film changed, said Chandler.

“It was going to be a documentary of the invisible eye sort, where it did not necessarily have an agenda and viewers could make up their own minds. After a while, through discussion with James, we came to realize he needed to be part of the film. It changed the movie in a much better way.”

72-year-old Dot resident Carl Chandler enrolled in the Clemente Course offered at Codman Square Health Center and soon found himself both a subject and producer of Rutenbeck’s film.

For Dixon, the story told in the film is one of “understanding,” of an outsider learning about the true reality of life for many Bostonians. Over the course of filming, Rutenbeck learns “more about the history of inequity and inequality that continues to exist in Boston, and how that leads to generational violence,” said Dixon. “It wasn’t a side of the city he was aware of. Carl and I, in our experiences, we walked James through seeing a whole Boston and not the Boston that is highlighted as inclusive, the Boston that a lot of people experience every day just surviving.”

While Rutenbeck’s framing of the film underscores the “reckoning with race, violence, and gentrification” taking place in the city, Dixon and Chandler each identified a greater, overarching foe: inequality.

“If you look at the film on the surface, it treats race as the lynchpin, but my experience is whatever your ethnicity or race is, if you’re poor you’re gonna catch hell,” said Chandler.

Dixon agreed: “I believe the bigger ill in our society is classism.”

In the film, Dixon and Chandler’s struggles are often dictated by greater economic forces: Dixon fears for the future of the plot of the land on which she farms as it is eyed by developers, while Chandler’s living situation is threatened at one point by a potential eviction. 

Describing what he called “unfettered capitalism,” Chandler lamented a resource gap and imbalance housing market that he has seen worsen in recent decades.

“The problem is you’re at the whim of a landlord whose bottom line usually is making a profit...it hits me hard because I see a lot of young people that won’t be able to afford buying a home in Boston.”

Chandler added that he hopes the film gives people a glimpse of what the day-to-day reality is for people living in Boston’s poorer neighborhoods.
“I don’t expect people to know the ins and outs of Dorchester or Roxbury, but there are important things happening there that affect the whole city...If I’m an outsider watching the film, maybe this motivates me to do a little bit more, be a little more aware of my fellow greater Bostonians.”

In discussing the power dynamic captured in the film, Chandler quoted Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal activist: ‘If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.’

“We’ve forgotten that we’re all in this together,” he said. “If the bottom one does better and has a chance for positive evolution, as a society we’re better.”

“A Reckoning in Boston” premieres in an online streaming format as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston on Thurs., May 6. To purchase tickets and for more information, visit iffboston.org.