First and foremost, Damu Godda is a movie for white people and the more scholarly populace. These aren’t my words. These are the words of Billy Jackson, the alter ego of the movie's protagonist Willie Redd, who produced the film amazingly while fighting a death sentence. In a rare interview with GCheck.tv, Billy mentioned how he made the movie to publicly mull the sort of conditions and the culture that commonly leads many inner-city males of similar make-up to constantly act out their worse impulses in youth. While some scholars and predominantly white scholars got the message (George F. Will sang the movie’s praises in a Washington Times op-ed whose headline called it “American Urban Decadence Dissected”), Black people saw it and dug it anyway. As has been proved in American cinema history, the most powerfully effective films are not simply documentary dramas but the ones most unflinching and critically uncovers and examines a person or a people.

Released in late 2019, Godda,Jackson’s debut feature, was made on a $10,000 budget and ended up grossing nearly $3 million from Amazon Prime's domestic audience, while the foreign language rights which Billy Jackson had practically given away in exchange for what amounted to lawyer fees would go on to gross multiple tens of millions of dollars, particularly in France and The Netherlands but across the EU proper, becoming a surprising sleeper hit through much of the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, Damu Godda: The Legend of Willie Redd outsold every ethnic/urban/gangster film of its genre, old as well as new—except for the never-say-die 1980s classic Scarface, of course, which moved two million extended Blu-ray editions at $100 per box on its 37th year anniversary in 2020 alone! Talk about a killer.

But for what it was and what it cost to make, Damu Godda was quite the feat, a jarring, exhilarating commentary on society's destructive culture as well as a rather awesome addition to the hood-movie genre, a genre that had otherwise long shown signs of been there, done that.

Growing up something of a neglected prodigy to a crack-addicted mother in a unforgiving environment and so coming off the porch a straight-up enfant terrible, with a long lost yet storied gang manifesto rumored the Bloods' Bible, but also a more recent indie blockbuster urban thriller novel in "Heaven and Hell on Earth , by Willie Earl Scott" and several of his own hip-hop videos (from two previous rap albums that caused all sorts of ruckus before they were pulled for instrumental infringement) under his belt, alias Billy Jackson—approaching his late thirties by this time—made a movie that aimed to be the antithesis of liberal sensibilities and Hollywood's approval, i.e., John Singleton’s more hopeful debut film.

If Boyz In The Hood is a Hollywood-sanctioned story of a young, inner-city Black man looking for a way out, Damu Godda is an easily blackballed story of a young, inner-city Black man wondering if it’s even worth it. With his intentions seemingly grounded in the desperation and cynicism of such circumstances, Billy Jackson show how, for many individuals living in former urban war zones like Birmingham, the hood is the devil they know. Set in early-nineties Northside North Central, which, as the filmmaker see it, has become far more tumultuous and plagued by hopelessness than it was even when it more or less began to disintegrate racially and economically, upon Willie's birth in 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, a president who Billy Jackson the filmmaker does not spare from the harshest of criticism and which the movie briefly reflects on via news footage, but a leader for whom Willie Earl Scott the country patriot greatly admires. Told mainly from the perspective of tween teen Willie Redd, a middle school dropout who stumbles into leading a notorious gang and learns to sell dope after stealing a kilogram of cocaine from his cunning uncle, a newly minted kingpin who didn’t have any problem ripping off his own suppliers and leaving his endangered family to fend off killers—which, as we see in flashbacks, Willie survived as a child, the film is narrated by Rundy Hormuz, also known as Run Howard, the LSE graduate and prominent Persian playwright who pissed off the Iranian hardliners governing his former homeland after converting to Christianity and publicly questioning the tenets of Islam as a Godly religion. The same Iranian government which had sought to ban novels and music by Willie Redd in years previous.

Damu Godda is a different animal altogether, selling in black markets and online from Europe to Africa, where its Swahili title—meaning "the blood of God"—has taken on something of a holy psalm among both the religious public and the youth in the sub-Sahara regions.

And now that its creator and subject matter has proven to be an even bigger mind of great intellect and ingenuity, with all of his innovative and capitalistic moves in the technological space, Damu Godda becomes that much more dynamic and significant in the eyes of critics and viewers alike.