If there are any good things to say about To Live and Die and Live (2025), they are that Amin Joseph (One of Them Days; Snowfall) is a very good actor; Skye P. Marshall (Let’s Be Cops; Coup!) can sell any line of rough dialogue; and director Qasum Basir (A Boy. A Girl. A Dream.; The Dutchman), and I do genuinely mean this with admiration, knows how to shoot the shit out of what looks like the under-filmed Atlanta airport interior standing in for Detroit Metro Airport.
L-R: Amin Joseph as Muhammad Abdullah and Omari Hardwick as Kevin in TO LIVE AND DIE AND LIVE. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
To Live and Die and Live stars Joseph as Muhammad, a Black Muslim film director with a drug and alcohol problem returning home to Detroit for his stepfather’s funeral. Between the airport and the mosque, he stops at a club where he falls for the mysterious party girl, Asia, played by Marshall. From there, the film becomes a series of dark-nights-of-the-soul as Muhammad escapes the world and night and tries to take care of his family’s money problems during the day while holding his grief inside. This attempt to address grief, love, addiction, mixed families, the racial makeup and politics of Detroit — all within the context of The Church of Islam, is messy and unfocused, but clearly personal.
“These your friends. These your people.”
Sometimes, with well-packaged issue films like last year’s The Stranger’s Case (2024) or Lavender Men (2024), the same impulse that causes a first-time director to leave it all on the field leads more experienced filmmakers to try and leave all of an issues’ facets on the field leading to a top-heavy film that no number of good performances or amount of good direction can shoulder. This is one such film.
L-R: Amin Joseph as Muhammad Abdullah and Skye P. Marshall as Asia in TO LIVE AND DIE AND LIVE. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Clearly influenced by walk-about independent film classics such as Before Sunrise (1995) and Medicine for Melancholy (2008), it’s the latter’s controversial housing advocacy meeting scene that shares the most DNA with this film, which repeatedly tries to enter moments like that to address the issues, but doesn’t have the confidence or power to stick around, despite its egregiously plump run time of 105-minutes. There are scenes about the recovery of Detroit that bear some strength, but it’s in one scene in particular where you can feel the film pull a muscle.
L-R: Amin Joseph as Muhammad Abdullah and Skye P. Marshall as Asia in TO LIVE AND DIE AND LIVE. Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Drunk and reeling from personal revelations, Muhammad is asked to give a short-notice Q and A to his alma mater’s film students where, amidst a cringe-inducing argument with the professor, he crashes out and tells these students not to be filmmakers. This is a sentiment you can hear more and more lately from the professional filmmakers above and below the line in an industry under attack from both its owners and its enemies. There are internet rumors of Kelly Reichart (Showing Up; Certain Women) telling this very sentiment to a student at Bard. I’ve sat in Q and As where independent filmmakers have said the same thing. Just a few weeks ago I worked with an incredible steadicam operator who’s waiting for the industry to pick back up enough to sell their gear and move on with their life. The monologue that Joseph gives about the false promise of Hollywood and the indignity of commercial art is clearly heartfelt from all involved, but, like many other scenes so specific they feel autobiographical, it feels like a scene the director needed to make, but not one that audiences needed to see. Such is the film.
In select theaters May 30th, 2025.
Available on VOD July 4th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Samuel Goldwyn Films To Live and Die and Live webpage.
Final Score: 2 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews, streaming
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