Institute History
Description
First, a word about the title. “Crasy,” with an “s” not a “z.” Gangsters’ spelling, not Webster’s. A ninety-five-minute, color film on the life and thoughts of the members of a Long Beach, California Samoan Crip gang—the Sons of Samoa Westside 32nd Street gang—My Crasy Life has at its core a commitment, radical in its simplicity: to respect the voice of its “subjects.”
—J.P. Gorin
Penetrating a relentless, complex, foreign, and, in many ways, impenetrable social organism, Gorin has recorded an unbridled and authentic articulation of the gang world’s convoluted existence. My Crasy Life takes the viewer through the discordant rhythms of raw street talk into the unnerving riddle of gang life, and inside its informed sense of inevitable tragedy without offering, or imposing, agendas, explanations or clichés. Using the radical documentary techniques of Flaherty, wherein the subjects dictate the terms of the film, My Crasy Life aspires to respectfully render a world completely foreign to the filmmaker and most viewers. Absent, therefore, are the diagnosis of a social ill, the presence of a denouement and a synthetic catharsis. My Crasy Life is a collaboration that is provocative in content and form.