“Moses the Black” is a new, graphically violent yet spiritually powerful film in which worlds collide, both horizontally and vertically.
The project, produced by 50 Cent and starring Omar Epps and rappers Wiz Khalifa (who delivers a standout performance) and Quavo, originated from an idea by producer, screenwriter, and director Yelena Popovic. Following her film “Man of God,” about the Orthodox Archbishop Nectarios of Aegina, Popovic set out to make a new film about Saint Moses the Black, the ancient Ethiopian monk considered one of the “Desert Fathers,” heroic souls who lived lives of self-denial and simplicity in the deserts of Egypt.
Director: Yelena Popovic
Writer: Yelena Popovic
Stars: Chukwudi Iwuji, Omar Epps, Wiz Khalifa
Father Josh Johnson, in his book “On Earth as It Is in Heaven: Restoring God’s Vision for Race and Discipleship,” offers this summary of the life of Moses, who is venerated as a saint in both the Orthodox and Catholic traditions:
One of the greatest African saints was a fourth-century monk who came to be known as Saint Moses the Black. In his youth, he was an outlaw and suspected murderer. The exact circumstances of his conversion are unknown, but at some point, he experienced the love of Christ and became a monk and eventually a priest. In the early Church, it was unusual for a monk to be ordained a priest, so this was an exceptional honor. He would become the leader of a small group of hermits in the western desert of Egypt. Around the year 405, at the age of seventy-five, Moses and his fellow hermits were martyred by the Berbers because of their commitment to Christ. To this day, monks continue to be inspired by the example of Saint Moses the Black.
But as Popovic attempted to tell Moses’s story, she was stuck for over two years, writing and rewriting the script, which always seemed incomplete. “Something is wrong,” she remembers telling her husband. “This isn’t the story I’m supposed to be telling.” That story, he later realized, wasn't centered on fourth-century Egypt, but on present-day Chicago. And its main character wouldn't be Moses the Black, but Malik (played by Epps), a gang leader who, after serving time in prison and attempting to avenge his friend's death, experiences a spiritual crisis. Moses would still be present, but now as a kind of Virgil to Malik, whose continued immersion in the hell of gang life coincides with glimpses of grace and a yearning for redemption.
That turning point begins with a conversation at the dinner table between Malik and his grandmother, a devout woman who raised him. They talk about life, death, and the afterlife, but Malik remains, as he does for most of the film, stoic, hardened by so many years of brutality and struggle. He can only offer clichés in response: “If I die tomorrow, I won’t regret anything… It doesn’t matter if there’s heaven or hell. My destiny is my destiny.” But then Malik’s grandmother gives him a holy card of Saint Moses the Black, who, she tells him, was also a gang member. “Take it and keep it with you.”
He does. And this “seed of the Word,” planted in Malik’s life by his grandmother, turns out to change everything. Before, Malik had effortlessly slipped back into his old life: exchanging handshakes and hugs on the street, and ordering the first of many shootings to avenge his friend’s death. “Retribution is coming,” he comments coldly. He is a man of this world, so much so that his partner, a tattoo artist, is tattooing a globe on his shoulders.
But after receiving the holy card, that old life is almost immediately invaded by the presence, the example, the mystery of Moses the Black (played by Nigerian-British actor Chukwudi Iwuji), so beloved by this woman who was so dear to Malik. And the first words Moses speaks to him—the words of Jesus—profoundly move him and never leave him: “He who kills with the sword will die by the sword.”
Throughout the rest of the film, Malik finds himself caught between what the Didache calls the “two ways”: the way of Life, suggested by Moses, and the way of Death, that “destiny” he had so readily accepted and from which he now struggles to free himself. The conflict is beautifully underscored by the motif of the train tracks running in opposite directions: every move Malik makes now matters, and it is a matter of life or death. Actions he wouldn't have thought twice about now fill him with dread; his former companions look at him with growing suspicion and distrust; and meanwhile, Moses, praying the psalms and the Jesus Prayer, performing penances in the solitude of the desert, crying out with tears of repentance, opens a path that Malik never thought possible: a masculinity of self-sacrifice.
Moses the Black is not a saccharine, superficial morality tale. It is a stubbornly authentic portrait of life in the underbelly of this "valley of tears," replete with street slang and references to drugs, bullets, and profanity. And Malik's conversion is not a sudden, radical transformation, but a gradual, complex turning toward the light, tinged with sadness and fraught with tragedy. But it is a turning toward the light, and it reflects how God, in Christ, saves humanity: not by eliminating sin all at once, but by entering into it with us, transforming human nature from within. Indeed, God comes to transform even the worst sinners into his saints.
Toward the film's climax, Malik looks at an icon of Moses the Black and asks him, "What is your secret?" He hears one of Moses's great sayings, quoted in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: "Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything." Bishop Erik Varden, reflecting on this passage in his recent series Desert Fathers in a Year, observes: "The cell in this story represents the place to which God's providence assigns us. For some, it will be a monastic cloister; for others, marriage. For others, it will be a task: a person in need to care for, an illness to endure, a reconciliation to achieve... The important thing is to let God act as he sees fit and not miss his visitation." By telling the story of a man who does not miss God's visitation amidst the violence and instability of the streets, Moses the Black is sure to spark much discussion, and perhaps, God willing, even among the saints.
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