Boyz'n the hood

In the 1980s, spurned on by the success of Spike Lee, young Afro-American directors began to develop scripts and films for the mainstream American movie industry. Previously, black filmmakers in the United States had to work completely outside the system or in the exploitation genres if they wished to work with black actors and black themes. John Singleton’s “Boyz ‘n the Hood” was one of the pioneering works of this new Hollywood cinema. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a young man who has grown up in the severely economically deprived inner-city ghetto of South Central Los Angeles. He has to decide whether to follow his friends into a life of gang criminality and drug use or whether to leave behind the “hood” and pursue an academic career as his embittered former activist father wants him to (Larry Fishburne). Refusing the exploitative excesses that dehumanise African-American ghetto characters in most action films, “Boyz n’ the Hood” reveals the complexity of growing up in a segregated world in which entrenched unemployment has meant that for young men, only the drug economy provides any chance for success or wealth. Cast also includes Ice Cube.