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Cauleen Smith’s capricious, slyly resourceful DIY feature debut, Drylongso, follows photography student Pica (Toby Smith) as she struggles to find her artistic voice in a school whose methodology is disconnected from the harsh realities of late-’90s Oakland. Countless Black men in her neighborhood have been victimized by police and gang violence or mercilessly swallowed by the prison industrial complex, and now there’s a serial killer on the loose targeting Black youth. In the film’s first scene, Pica even witnesses another young woman, Tobi (April Barnett), get beaten up in front of her house and abandoned by her boyfriend (Timothy Braggs).

Pica copes with, and confronts, these various forms of violence by taking Polaroid photos of as many Black men as she can, explaining to Tobi, whom she soon befriends, that it’s because they’re becoming an endangered species. A supportive teacher, Mr. Yamada (Salim Akil...

In Drylongso, Pica (Toby Smith) coughs her way through each day. She goes to photography class at the local college, works nights putting up posters for various missing persons and political organizers, and survives in a household with her mother and grandmother, along with an open-door assortment of the former’s friends. Her sickness becomes an afterthought, a part of her character that cannot be fixed, treated, or resolved.

Pica documents the Black men in her neighborhood in Oakland, several of which have gone missing or have been murdered by an anonymous serial killer. She asks them, “Can I take your picture?” pulls out her Polaroid camera, and snaps a shot, keeping them in a rubber-banded stack in her backpack. Her photography, and her extended art, can be seen as a way of documentation, but also as remembrance. Funerals keep happening, but at least these young Black men dying have this “evidence of existence,...

One of the long-overlooked gems of 1990s indie filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso has now been restored in 4K from The Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A poignant and vibrant look at the life of an art student as she deals with academia, friendship, romance, and death circling around her, every frame of the dazzling new restoration pops. Now set for a theatrical release kicking off at Film at Lincoln Center on March 17, the new trailer and poster have arrived.

“A lost treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Afrofuturist art star Cauleen Smith’s film embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie-murder mystery-romance,” reads the official synopsis. “Observing the alarming rate at which the young Black men around her are dying—indeed, “becoming extinct,” as she sees it—brash Oakland art student Pica (Toby Smith) begins preserving their existence in Polaroid snapshots,...