Movies: The Gospel According to Tigre

Hill thought he was on his way to Hollywood after a remote connection at Viacom offered him a “pitiful” option on the film. But the option expired, and by the mid-1990s, Hill was selling electronics at the Silo in Bryn Mawr. When his mother became ill, he moved home to take care of her. When she passed away in 1998, he was 30 and alone and decided to get serious about film.

Hill was at Wing Bowl in January 2003 when he saw a guy wearing a KATZ FOR MAYOR button. The 2003 Philly mayoral campaign — a rematch between incumbent Democrat John Street and Republican Sam Katz — was gearing up. Documentaries were hot, and Hill decided to make one about the nastiness sure to ensue. It was about race, clearly — but to Hill, it was just as much about questioning orthodoxy, as his high-school confession film had done.

Shame of a City reveals Philly racial politics, down and dirty. Several months into the production, Street’s City Hall office was found to be bugged, and though this turned out to be part of a federal investigation into corruption, the discovery galvanized Street supporters, who were sure the bug was a racial plot, perhaps engineered by George Bush and his henchmen, to bring down an African-American leader. In a climactic scene, Katz’s handlers advise him to describe the bugging situation as “not about black and white, but about green — the color of greed.” Technically true, perhaps, but it was irrelevant to the many voters who were convinced it was about race. Katz lost. The “Shame” came later — a bag of indictments and convictions for corruption that occurred under the reelected Street.

Of course, as an African-American, Hill wasn’t supposed to come out publicly against a black leader that way. He got threats, he says, from union members who supported Street’s campaign. “I also got taken aside by — I can’t tell you his name, but I was at an Eagles game, in a person’s box, and an African-American took me aside. He told me basically, ‘You’re an -African-American, you’re young. Do you want to pursue a career?’”

Shame was named “Best Feature” in its category at the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival, and Hill had himself a reputation.

“The media called me this crazy, opposite, Republican Michael Moore,” he says. “God forbid you’re African-American and you go against an African-American politician. But I wasn’t going against anybody. I was telling a story.”