Beyond Books at KCPL: ‘Quest’ – A Portrait of an American Family

By Chris Barrett

Beyond Books is a column intended to alert Arts Knoxville readers to interesting music and video materials new to Knox County Public Library’s fabulous Sights & Sounds collection. As our collection of Blu-ray, 4K, and streaming titles continues to grow, we’ll also revisit classics and oddities as they become available in modern formats.

Watch for links or click on the covers: you’ll be invited to connect directly to KCPL’s catalog where you can place items on reserve and have them delivered to your favorite branch … or simply stream them at your convenience.

Quest

DVD, First Run Features, 2018, 105 min

For his 2014 film Boyhood, director Richard Linklater coordinated shooting over a span of 12 years. Audiences had the unusual experience of seeing cast-members age along with their characters. Viewers felt like they were growing up with the youngsters and suffering the setbacks of the adults, and became invested in a shared fate. Perhaps unintentionally, makers of the Harry Potter films created a similar effect by generating eight films over a decade while using the same young lead actors.

For his film debut, Jonathan Olshefski has applied what is ostensibly the same technique of prolonged attention to a single story. The fact that QUEST: A Portrait of an American Family is a documentary, however, along with his choice of subjects, gives Olshefski’s film a strength, urgency and dignified beauty that few feature films approach.

At the beginning of the first Obama administration, we meet the Rainey family, struggling to abide in North Philadelphia. Christopher, or “Quest,” sometimes “Q,” delivers papers and does odd jobs for income. His wife, Christine’a, works night shift at a shelter for women. Daughter Pamela is in middle school. Quest and Christine’a have histories and children from earlier couplings, and they occasionally pass before the camera. In the family’s basement, Quest has assembled a recording studio, where he welcomes and encourages the neighborhood’s young men. On “Freestyle Fridays,” an extended family of aspiring rappers animate the household and give some joyous relief to the war-torn and seemingly otherwise abandoned neighborhood. Whether or not you like hip-hop or the way these fellows practice their craft is beside the point. Their music is one of the few signs of life in this neighborhood other than distant tail lights and random gunfire.

Over a fleeting period of an hour and 45 minutes—trimmed from 300 hours of footage—we spend 10 years with these people.

A motif established early during the film is the love expressed by a woman tending her family’s hair. As she administers unguents and tension and plaits you can see scars on Christine’a’s hands and arms, later explained. The family will collect more scars before the end credits.

The Raineys’ home is modest and the rooms are small, rarely allowing Olshefski and his camera to be more than a foot or two from his subjects. There’s no getting away from the multiple leaks in the roof. Hallways function as rooms, and furniture makes it necessary to pass through them sideways. Adding to the intimacy of the film is the fact that this family speaks quietly to each other and to the filmmaker, who seems as much a member of the family as the come-and-go hip-hoppers and the beat cops who treasure this island of sanity and hope.

When tragedy strikes the Raineys, what’s most alarming is their collective determination to deal. The day after is nearly the same as the day before, simply with a different list of things that must be done and will be done, together.

Quest is a fabulous film, richly human, uncontrived. According to press materials, Olshefski had originally planned to simply photograph the Raineys. Let us be thankful that he adapted to make the most of this opportunity.