From Gun Man to God Man: Cheating Death (Watching the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Caribbean Cinema, Part I) (Resena de Pelicula‪)‬

Cheating Death. Written and directed by Eric Geringas. Montreal, PQ: National Film Board of Canada, 2005. 25 minutes. The topic of guns, gangs, Black youth and violence has become an increasingly urgent matter in Canadian cities such as Toronto over the last decade. Negative media portrayals of so-called "at-risk" communities, which tend to be heavily populated by Caribbean, African, South Asian and Latino families, persist, while the members of these communities recount incidences of overpolicing, police harassment, and racial profiling. Debates rage in the media over the pros and cons of publicly funded Black-focused schools, while the murder rate of young Black males in the city continues to climb. In the midst of this comes Eric Geringas' 2005 documentary on Gyasi Ferdinand, former crack dealer, former gun man, who meets death twice on the operating table following an assassination attempt, and who in return gives his life to God. Although this is a provocative and insightful tale of one young man, (dubbed a "character study" by the National Film Board of Canada) Gyasi's tale is only one snapshot among the thousands of boys/men who are "cheating death"--or not--every waking minute. Geringas' film leaves one with more questions than answers, particularly at a time when, for many in Toronto's Black and Caribbean communities, things have reached a crisis point.