Charles Lane plays a street artist whose efforts to care for an abandoned toddler are confounded by the many oddball characters he meets. Black-and-white and mostly silent, the film is a whimsical take by a black artist to give a voice to those who have none.

“An homage to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), Sidewalk Stories, like the classic American silents it celebrates (a salute further enhanced by Lane’s soulful, Buster Keaton–esque eyes), is sweet and tender but never maudlin. With a light touch, Lane foregrounds not only the prevalence of homelessness in the city (most powerfully in the film’s closing minutes) but also the humiliations of classism and racism.” – Melissa Anderson, Artforum

“…The effect is startling, but till then the quietly radical nature of Sidewalk Stories lies in the dialectical tension between its whimsically nostalgic formal approach and its bold representation of pressing contemporary issues. While The Artist was set in the safely fossilized world of silent-era filmmaking, there’s something genuinely strange about seeing New York—one of the world’s most famously rambunctious cities—drained of sound and color” – Ashley Carter, Film Comment