When I screen a film, I usually try to avoid knowing too much about it going in; I hold off on reading the press kit, for example, until after I've seen the film, so as to experience the film with the same information the average person watching it has. Cinnamon is one of those rare films where everyone, myself included, would have benefited from having a press kit handed out at the door, because what director Kevin Jerome Everson is trying to accomplish with the film makes a lot more sense with that background knowledge. In short, Everson is primarily a visual artist, and his films, which are "experimental" (meaning: not what one might ordinarily expect in terms of focus, presentation, or cinematography) are primarily visual and not quite what you might expect them to be.

In Cinnamon, as in his debut feature Spicebush, Everson blends documentary-type footage, artistic visual elements, and scripted narrative to tell a story. Everson's work, he says in his director's statement, focuses mostly on the culture of working class Black Americans. In Cinnamon, Everson turns his lens to the world of African American drag racing, specifically Bracket Racing, which uses a handicapping system that allows each car to have an equal chance of winning, regardless of the money poured into it. Everson introduces us to the Knowles family, headed by father John Knowles, a mechanic well-known in his local drag-racing community. John's brother Larry, 12-year-old daughter Ashley, and wife Rhonda are all involved in racing. It is, for them, both a family sport and a way of life.

Here's where the press kit at the door would have come in handy: the other character in the film is Erin, a bank teller and race driver in her mid 20s. By about the midpoint of the film, I was maddeningly annoyed at Everson for not showing us more about Erin - her motiviations and aspirations, what drives her to drag race cars, what it's like to be a woman competing in the male-dominated sport of drag racing. Everson showed us interviews with everyone but Erin. Why? Well, because unlike the rest of the people in the film, Erin is an actress playing a part, not a real drag racer. She represents, as Everson says in the press kit, Ashley, John's daughter, when she is older. Ashley, the 12-year-old drag racer, is the "found" object, Erin is a created abstraction, her dual roles as bank worker and race car driver an homage to Everson's parents.

This is all nice to know in retrospect, but it makes for a rather confusing film watching experience. We see very little of Ashley, the real girl racer, on screen - a very brief interview, and a couple shots of her at the track. Erin is shown mostly walking around looking introspective and serious, sitting down and looking introspective and serious, sitting behind the wheel of a car looking introspective and serious, sitting at her desk at work looking...well, you get the point. Actress Erin Stewart creates a compelling and intense character, but we never really get to know her. Ashley, in the brief time we meet her, also glows with intensity and promise, but again, we are cut short of getting a deeper look at her. It's like someone showing you a delectable dessert - you can see it, you can smell, it, you can almost taste it - and then whisking it away.

Everson has chosen to make a film that communicates more visually than through dialogue, and so even in the scripted scenes the dialogue is often minimal and hard to hear. Everson focuses also on the routine of drag racing: work on the car, check the car, load the car, drive the car, rinse, repeat. In some films, like Man Push Cart, this kind of repetition works very well to convey a sense of the endless routine of a person's life. In Cinnamon, the endless repetition, combined with the frequent 2-3 second screen blackouts, began to just grow wearying. The screening started out a little less than 2/3 full in a 250-seat capacity theater; before the film was over there were 32 walkouts. Everson may not mind if roughly 20 percent of his audience gives up and leaves, but when I start running out of room in the space I've alloted to chalk-line walkouts, I tend to see that as an indicator the film is not connecting with a significant portion of its audience.

Everson is foremost an artist, and his film has an almost indulgently artsy feel to it. While Everson is to be commended for trying something new and experimental, blending different styles in his storytelling, and playing with bringing a more strictly visual approach to film- creating, in effect, a moving sculpture - in the case of Cinnamon, his style just left me feeling half-full, wanting to learn more about the people and the story. Such is Everson's style, though; he's obviously a highly creative and intellectual artist and would probably make for a fascinating conversational companion over a cup of coffee. If your audience needs a press kit to understand what you're trying to convey in your film, though, you're aiming for a really narrow audience. Everson may be perfectly fine with this, but from my perspective, if you want to make films that tell stories about middle class Black America (or anything else, really), and you want your ideas to be seen and understood by a wide array of people, you need to tone down the artistic pretense a notch and just tell the story.