In his first feature film “Residue” art imitates life for writer, director and D.C. native Merawi Gerima.

The movie centers around, Jay, an aspiring filmmaker who returns to the District to write a screenplay about the Eckington neighborhood where he grew up, only to find it transformed.

“It looks a lot different around here,” Jay says in the movie.

“I was like an alien crashlanding in some, you know, brave new world,” Gerima says of his real-life experience coming back to Eckington.

Sitting outside his parents video and bookstore, which has survived waves of gentrification itself, Gerima recalled the first summer he returned home from film school at the University of Southern California.