“The people here came by water.

They live by the water and eat from the water.

We are water people.” My name is Jon-Sesrie Goff and I'm the director of After Sherman.

After Sherman is a story about inheritance, a personal story told through the lens of my Gullah Geechee community and my family.

It's a story of me struggling to understand the sacrifices my father made, and the reason why generations have held on to this piece of land in the low country in South Carolina, despite all of the trauma associated with the region.

One of my favorite tableaus in the film is the scene with my dad and I in the interview set up together surrounded by flora.

“Everybody in the neighborhood was welcome at the table in the homes that were lined in that community.

So when one eat, everybody eats.

If you had something to share, you shared it.” So many of the interviews I did with my dad, I was sitting across from them like a traditional interviewer.

I wanted to have something where we could both be vulnerable, where we could both go through the process of confronting our emotions of encountering the camera, of telling our stories.

A lot of the early filming was just me traveling from church to church with him throughout the Edisto district, where he would go have meetings and I'd travel along and film a bit.

I didn't know that the story would become about him.

“Ive most certainly have fond memories of my father building the house, straightening out old nails and how the front porch was built in terms of throwing dirt and old cans and bottles, anything to fill up the inner portion of the porch, before the concrete was poured.” I wanted the film to have a tactile feeling of being handmade, something that was crafted out of love, like how I felt this community was made and crafted for me to experience and grow up in.

This work is a bit of a tapestry.

It's a quilt.

It's not a traditional braid, in the narrative sense, with three strands.

It's much more free associative.

We've got patches here and there that on their own may not look that spectacular, but once you begin to put them next to each other and you see them all adjacent, you can see how they work together to create this beautiful quilt.

“It's a place that we were always able to go long before we built these homes.

But this not did not start with your mother and father, but it also starts with your great-grandparents and great-great- grandparents who were slaves, but yet still found a way.

That's the legacy.

It's an inheritance.”