‘Master of Light’ Review: Doc Is a Graceful Look at Black Classical Painter George Anthony Morton

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“Darkness is my friend.” Those sober words by Black classical painter George Anthony Morton, the introspective subject of Rosa Ruth Boesten’s harrowing and spellbinding documentary “Master of Light” — which won the Grand Jury Award for documentary feature at SXSW — refracts the film’s title from an aesthetic ethos to a way of life. It paints Morton’s present mental health struggles — the obvious and unconscious reverberations of his socio-economic environment on his past and current life — and the seemingly inescapable cycles that still crush his family.

Boesten, however, doesn’t reduce Morton’s painful history to degradation. Because you don’t measure light through its absence; you find it in the human eye. And Black folks are filled with light. Even when the world, from conception to death, distorts Black people’s worth — even during structural racism and anti-blackness — or against the ceaseless undertow of mental trauma, Black people still project radiance. Morton maps a similar radiance onto his portraits. And, in his return home to Kansas City, Missouri, to mend a broken relationship with his mother, he finds light amidst the darkness in the flickering glow of his kin’s eyes.