Filmmaker Tanya Hamilton 'Catches' Up With Ex-Black Panthers

In Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us, ex-Black Panthers confront the ways in which their former radicalism has since shaped their lives, years after they cut ties with the organization.

Set in 1976, the movie tells the story of Marcus, a former Black Panther who returns to Philadelphia for the first time in several years for his father's funeral. Before he left home, his cohort Neil was killed in a police shootout; several other Panthers accused Marcus of telling the cops where to find him.

Upon returning to town, Marcus encounters Neil's widow, Patricia, now a civil-rights lawyer who is raising a daughter alone. He also encounters Patricia's cousin Jimmy, who grew up seeing the Panthers and idolizes everything about them — and appears to be headed for his own violent confrontation with the cops.

"I think Jimmy is my favorite character," filmmaker Hamilton tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "He's the most flawed character in the film. Jimmy is someone who borrows someone else's history without understanding where it comes from and how it's being fought."

Hamilton's film traces the ways Marcus deals with these complicated relationships he left behind — and the ways in which his fellow ex-revolutionaries have struggled with understanding their own radical pasts.

"I often try to say that there's something both tragic and very romantic in that period, during the civil rights [struggles] and the transition into black power," Hamilton says. "I felt like the film not only needed to talk about the waning days [of the Black Panthers], but also about what ultimately destroyed the Panthers and the complexity of that destruction."

Hamilton, who wrote and directed the film, explains that she titled the film after a common saying in Jamaica: "Don't let night catch you."

"That simply means come back at a decent hour," she says. "I felt like the film is about these people who are all running in various directions. And it spoke in a way of their history and how it was going to catch up with them, and they were going to have to contend with it."