Raised/Razed is a documentary feature film about the lasting effects of the federally-backed and locally-executed Urban Renewal program, through the lens of Vinegar Hill, a large African American neighborhood in the heart of Charlottesville, Virginia, that for 100 years thrived as the center of business, education, religious, and cultural life, until it — like hundreds of Black communities across America — was destroyed. Raised/Razed was written and directed by filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson and journalist Jordy Yager who, after two years of extensive research, have woven original audio interviews of former Vinegar Hill residents from the early 1980s with modern-day interviews from their descendants, to bring the neighborhood back to life as it existed at its height and to take viewers into the homes, classrooms, and businesses of community members.

D, DA, A and M are between 16 and 28 years old. They are hikikomori, they never leave the house, two of them not even their rooms. I have never met them in person, nor will I ever.
We begin to exchange life experiences, words, videos, photos, in a period in which I am constantly wondering and feeling those expectations that everyone, at a certain point in life, feels, because, like M rightly says, “by your 30s, something HAS to happen”.
They propose to me to try to live like them, to better understand why they have decided to isolate themselves. We got closer and closer, and I end up becoming almost obsessed with their presence/absence and their life choices. Theirs is a refusal, it is a resounding NO they scream silently from their rooms, where they lock themselves up because they cannot bear the performance anxiety that social standards make us feel, thus demonstrating a sort of “resistance”.