Harlem Fragments: Haunted Memory and Valiant Attempts to Save Love

Cameron Tyler Carr’s 18-minute sci-fi drama Harlem Fragments is not a trip down memory lane. It is an adventure spanning years with the quest to salvage the remains of a life that once looked all but permanent. 

Emotionally fraught, and splintered in structure, the film follows 10 year-old TJ’s (Kyle Keyes) attempts to understand what happened to his family in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The family home is lost, the parents (Clarissa Thibeaux and Roderick Lawrence) are breaking up, and his sister (Stella Coviello) is harsher than a lonely and confused boy can comfortably process. Keyes is sweet and believable enough that his reactions to his life falling apart so thoroughly evokes compassion; the credit for that should also go to Carr’s direction, of whose own experiences TJ is a stand-in. 

The film is labelled sci-fi, but it has the qualities of fantasy, in that it is propelled by the boy’s belief in magic, and what’s more, his outscaled belief in his own power to fix things. The film understands a boy’s need for those beliefs, and perhaps this is why when it heads into the big unknown of space and reckoning with the truth, it opts for animation. Shielded inside his trusty helmet, TJ begins to sift through the memories of his still ongoing childhood within the spaceship Hummingbird (a black woman with afro hair, voiced by Jaleeca Yancy,  as the ship’s AI assistant is a rare, and thus, gratifying image). The sax heavy jazz score intensifies the melancholic sorrow of any moment it accompanies, and piece by piece of memory, TJ is struck by permanence of his new normal. 

The animation is the most impressive visual aspect of the film, but the editing takes the cake for the shattered continuity of the narrative. TJ reevaluates every memory, unsure of its reliability. Were Mom and Dad really happy that evening or was he imagining things? And could he not, now, retroactively, make them stop fighting? It is childish, and the authentic product of lived experience. 

Harlem Fragments, co-written between Carr, Danielle Douge, and Wes Andre Goodrich, is an attempt to air out the house, or at least organise its old ghosts in safe compartments. The American national trauma of the recession, manifold worse for black folks, is its resident ghost in chief, the compounder of all its creaky hinges and noisy pipes. TJ can only hear it in the echoes, but it is enough for the rest of us to know how big its form and how stubborn its presence. For TJ, it has to be enough, to know that the house exists.

Watch Harlem Fragments Short Film Trailer