“Know Your Place” - Film Review
This review was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
The idea of home differs from person to person. For some, it’s a tangible building with four walls and a roof. Home can be a person to someone else. It can be something larger, like a community that spans an entire city. Humans, by nature, are endlessly searching for a sense of place, a feeling of serenity and belonging. Know Your Place, writer/director Zia Mohajerjasbi’s feature film debut, looks at home as the city of Seattle through the eyes of a teenage boy whose family moved there from Eritrea. Seattle is the only home he’s ever known, yet he’s intrinsically tied to a country and a way of life that’s carried on through traditions and family members who have also immigrated to the United States. Know Your Place is a trek across Seattle that reflects on familial responsibility, gentrification, and growing up.
courtesy of the film
Robel (Joseph Smith) is tasked with carrying out a seemingly simple errand for his mother (Selamawit Gebresus): deliver a suitcase across town. Said suitcase is filled with toiletries, money, and other goods that are destined for a sick relative in his home country. But without a car and with new hurdles that arise around every corner, Robel is finding himself in over his head. He calls on his best friend, Fahmi (Natnael Mebrahtu), to help get the suitcase across town. The teens find themselves caught between two worlds as they try to figure out how to honor a place they’ve never known and the place where they live.
The easiest recent comparison for this film is The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It would be easy to rename Know Your Place as The Last Black Man in Seattle. Both films are centered on young, Black men (teens in Know Your Place) who grapple with the loss of their communities because of economic displacement. They see family members and friends lose their homes as richer, and usually white, people move in. Frustration and anger come from this because it’s not just cosmetic changes and Whole Foods stores that pop up, it’s the disruption of a culture that has already fought an uphill battle to build a sense of community in a foreign country. Know Your Place, as a title, is an urgent declaration. It is asking the viewer to know their neighborhood. To know the small businesses and people who make up the tapestry of an area. If we lose our communities, what do we have left?
courtesy of the film
Know Your Place is a gentle coming-of-age story about a teen boy who’s stuck between two ways of life. He wants to honor his Eritrean roots, but he also wants to be the American teen that he is. The film is about him understanding that it’s not one identity over the other, but that he has to find a balance that makes sense for him. It’s interesting to watch the way language is used throughout the film and what it means when each of the characters decides to switch between English and Tigrinya.
There’s a lyrical nature to the film that comes out in monologues from various characters. Know Your Place is an odyssey of its own, so these departures feel natural to the story and allow for beautiful reflections on the immigrant experience. “You don’t know what it means to leave somewhere behind,” says Robel’s mother, and she’s right. He doesn’t know that feeling, but he has a different loss, one that comes from not knowing that way of life at all. Know Your Place is a personal story of identity, one that feels universal in its quest for belonging.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.