Summary
In the hush before dusk, a boy named Edgar stitches the savannah out of bedsheets and porch-light, crowning himself monarch of a cardboard veldt. His mind gallops past the Mississippi fence-line, past the choke of coal smoke, into a continent he’s never known except through penny-pulp lithographs: ivory caravans, leopard-print skies, drumbeats that sound—at least in his ears—like the throb of his own pulse. He corrals neighborhood children into this fever dream; they become Ashanti princes, Nubian queens, barefoot Maasai knights. Yet the moment imagination brushes against the real skin of race, class, and backyard power games, the fantasy buckles. A cardboard crown wilts under July sweat; a borrowed bedsheet toga tangles in bicycle spokes. Edgar’s epic collapses into squabbles over who gets to hold the paper mache elephant tusk, and the once-lush inner savannah turns suburban battlefield. What began as playful cartography of an imagined Africa mutates into a bruising map of America’s own racial hierarchies, seen obliquely through the scrim of children’s games. The film watches, unblinking, as innocence curdles into micro-aggression, as the boy-hero confronts the impossibility of translating his dreamlife into shared territory without trampling someone else’s story.
Synopsis
Edgar is a great hero in his imaginary African adventures, but when it comes to actually reproducing them in the backyard of his home with his playmates as African kings and princesses, trouble begins.
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