THE RETRIEVAL MAKES UP A STRANGE STORY
Without titles or voiceovers, the plot of The Retrieval is difficult to discern because the actors, who have good diction in person, mumble their lines almost incoherently on screen. The best way to figure out the plot is to attend a screening followed by a Question-and-Answer session with writer-director Chris Eska, who professes interest in what happened to former slaves between the day when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect (1/1/1963) and the end of the Civil War. Claiming that there is no documentation on the subject, he makes up a plot in which a few slaves have escaped from their captivity and are wandering about in 1864, trying to stay alive amid occasional eruption of combat. Southerners, trying to round them up, recruit teenage slave Will (played by Ashton Sanders) to help them find at least one particular escapee. But most Blacks remained on the plantations, where they retained food and shelter, and the film does not answer why some became renegades. MH