One root of the word gospel means “good telling,” and in After Sherman, the good telling takes the form of a personal essay by multidisciplinary artist Jon-Sesrie Goff. Expressionistic in tone and encyclopedic in scope, the film explores a fragmented and tenuous history of land and legacy that reaches back to the slave trade and resonates through the present day. Questions of time and tragedy, of place and prejudice, reverberate in the film, and the filmmaker lends keen eyes and ears to the depiction of these inquiries through an ambitious palette of visual techniques and a complex sound design. 

As we learn more about the filmmaker’s coastal South Carolina heritage, we also meet his contemplative father, Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, Sr. This stirring, evocative film collects and preserves shared memory and interrogates a fraught history through home movies, ruminative narration, a vivid jazz score, and attentive cinematography that are knitted together as expertly as a Gullah fishing net.  TM 

Filmmaker Q&A available

Closed captioning available

This film is only available to viewers in the United States