Black Picket Fence

Tislam "Tiz" Milliner leads a precarious existence in a housing project in East New York, Brooklyn. Locally, he's a rap star. Tiz dreams of landing a record deal and getting out of the projects. His girlfriend, L'eisha Wilson, is pregnant with his baby, and Tiz struggles to distance himself from his ...more

Sergio Goes' Black Picket Fence is a compelling and troubling documentary about life in the projects. The film focuses on aspiring rapper Tislam "Tiz" Milliner of East New York, intimately exploring his relationship with his good friend, Mel, a recently paroled drug dealer. There's a chilling moment in the film when Mel calmly describes a robbery he and Tiz committed that ended badly, with Tiz inadvertently shooting Mel in the back. Goes succeeds in giving a sense of the numbing prevalence of ...more