The Brooklyn Rail

In Alexis Neophytides and Andres “Jay” Molina’s Fire Through Dry Grass (2023), the Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center, at the northern tip of New York City’s Roosevelt Island, becomes a machine that eats its children alive. The raw and immersive film, which was awarded Best Feature Documentary at the 12th BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia in August, chronicles the ordeal faced by the nursing home’s residents, whom authorities treated as collateral damage and cannon fodder during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From the onset, we are shown that Coler isn’t just a public, anonymous nursing home: it’s foremost an abode and a community for those who live within its walls. Among its residents are the Reality Poets, a group of Black and Latino wheelchair-bound residents, who have found solace in creativity after surviving gun violence, jail time, and hardships on the streets. They meet daily in the courtyard and in the library, to “smoke and talk shit.”

Vince, one of the Reality Poets, lays out the stakes in the first scenes of the film. “Will I survive through these hard times?” Like his friends, he’s a disabled person of color confined to a nursing home while the pandemic spreads across the US. Many of them also live with underlying conditions. He and the others are not off to a good start when on March 13, 2020, Coler closes its doors to the public and the lockdown starts, resulting in an unforgiving and cruel year of solitude, survival, and injustice for these residents. Equipped with a phone camera tied to their chair, the residents film their transformed existence, which is now removed from friends and family, and expunged from the comfort of each other’s physical company.

“It’s getting really, really hectic over here,” a Reality Poet says during a Zoom meeting.

“I feel like I’m locked in jail again,” his friend replies with a mix of anxiety and resignation, as police officers ominously guard doors. They share their feelings of entrapment, depression, and being abandoned to their fates. While filming themselves, their raw emotions settle in the silences and ellipses of the disembodied setting of a Zoom video call. These pauses convey confusion and capture their attempts to grapple with the unknown. Outside, New York City has become the virus’s epicenter. Inside, masks and protective equipment are missing; protocols are inconsistently applied. COVID-positive patients are not isolated from the rest of the population. “All this stuff is common sense,” says Vince, except that Coler doesn’t heed that logic.

Their daily life is radically altered when Governor Cuomo declares on March 25 that all New York City nursing homes must accept residents that are medically stable, irrespective of their COVID status. Multi-bed occupancy rooms are forcibly shared with COVID-positive patients, the only privacy and safety a flimsy curtain between them. The Reality Poets descend to hell; their long agony begins. One of the Poets records his neighbor’s shallow breathing, touches the thin fabric of their shared curtain, before turning the camera to his own anguished, incredulous face. He doesn’t know what to say and we don’t either.

The residents are understandably terrified. Meanwhile, the Coler administration lies, claiming that these patients are not positive (or were asymptomatic) while under-reporting the number of deaths. Predictably, the virus super-spreads and cross-contamination occurs (“the people are just dropping dead like flies”). It takes sixty-seven days for Coler to open a quarantine floor dedicated to COVID-positive patients. A crime. When Cuomo’s order was eventually rescinded in May 2020, it was already too late, which the film shows through the story unfolding over the course of a year.

The Reality Poets try to count their dead and mourn them amid continued cover-ups by the Coler administration and Cuomo’s ill-advised, life-endangering policies. Their wheelchairs take us along empty, labyrinthine corridors, where we peek at the plastic silhouettes of nurses and doctors. The residents explore its bowels like they survey the organs of a decaying body. The film positions their dehumanization and stripped agency as the symptoms of a wider systemic violence against people that society has previously neglected. History repeats itself.

That genealogy aptly resonates with the site of Roosevelt Island and the times of Black Lives Matter, both of which are discussed in the film. Ironically, Coler is a facility known for its memory care program. The residents, those who eventually made it through, bear witness. They refuse to go along; they will remember. “Let’s expose these motherfuckers,” a Reality Poet says after having no other recourse.

Questions of incarceration, race, and disability have long shaped the history of Roosevelt Island, formerly Blackwell’s Island and “Welfare Island.” So-called “incurables” used to be sent to its asylum (visitors today can stand by the ruins of the smallpox hospital, which closed in the 1950s). Plans had been made to turn the island into a multiracial and classless utopia in the 1960s and 1970s. But the Reality Poets see little of that promise. Instead, Roosevelt Island represents a crevice, an in-betweenness that serves to remind them of their isolation and their undesirable status.

The film, at wheelchair/eye level, affirms personhood as a resistance to oppression. The residents are their own filmmakers and narrators. In the story, they chose to center their vantage points and gazes, reversing the assigned roles of givers and receivers. In the nursing home, they wait for the instructions of others. In the film, they tell us what we should see. The residents alternate between character-defining certainties (“He was a good man”) and erasure (“I’ve lost the essence of who I was”). They want to escape their harrowing present—lockdown days soon reach triple digits—while retaining their agency and wholeness. And if the virus attacks the body, the administration’s dystopian mismanagement infects the mind, with a devastating human toll.

Raw, diaristic, epistolary footage is interlaced with animated drawings and archives that anchor the overall narrative into individual stories—where the Reality Poets come from, who they are. We slip into the past as if the men consider the depth of their impasse, the impossibility of a future. The whimsical characteristics of the drawings—grass, pasture—are almost naïve given that they amount to testaments and self-eulogies of sorts. They also remind the viewer that most of these men have experienced hardships at young ages. The animation’s neon mint green and fuchsia is their visual response to this new black death, the gray of outside, and the pale white of the nursing home.

The film centers justice as an avatar of humanity. Men, who have been on a personal journey of redemption, continue to be punished for inexistent deeds. They face Kafkaesque injunctions and silences, the brutality of a “non-humane” system that crushes them. In this tale of senseless neglect, three questions haunt us as we watch: How much more horrific can it get? Will they survive this? Will anyone ever be held accountable?

Art’s potency is woven throughout, not least in the existence of the film itself (Andres “Jay” Molina, a Reality Poet, is the film’s co-director and co-cinematographer). The poets are also playwrights, musicians, animation designers, and filmmakers. Without the camera, without the blogs, would we even know of these stories? Verses and rhymes keep them sane as they process the sheer insanity of their situation.

I’ve resisted watching or reading anything related to COVID until now. Perhaps like you, those memories of sirens, isolation, and fear had to settle, and three years just weren’t long enough. The pandemic needed to become history first to become an object of excavation and examination. But the film re-awakened one thing in me: absolute rage. Despite wanting to move on, let’s be honest, this pandemic remains very much in our future.

We often measure the sophistication of societies by the extent to which they care for their most vulnerable. Fire Through Dry Grass is a damning report, which should be made mandatory viewing.