Entries in Films (11)
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Vita's Garden
Filmmaker Shalini Kantayya has produced another eloquent visual meditation entitle Vita's Garden. This time, Shalini tells a story about a young girl named Vita seeking to nurture something else in her neighborhood besides neglect. Shalini's short vignette draws the reader in hopes that our imaginations, like Vita's garden, shall also blossom. See it here and submit your vote for her this worthwhile project. Medicine For Melancholy
When OGF W. Franklin passed on a link to Medicine for Melancholy's website I immediately knew that I wanted to see it, but now that I'm hearing the buzz it's getting out in the Yay, interest level has soared even further. One of my favorite things to do in San Francisco is walk around, and much like NYC, San Francisco is extremely walkable. Each carrefour has a story of its own, and the stories often told by the friends who have served as my tour guides during these trips has made this city endearing. While I wouldn't necessarily want to live in San Fran, I definitely would never want to be denied the pleasure of walking its streets. Medicine for Melancholy appears to be an extension of one of these walking trips and my love affair with the Bay. You can check the film out this weekend in MD and SF.
Honeydripper
Iconoclastic filmmaker John Sayles, in his 16th feature film, continues his extraordinary examination of the complexities and shifting identities of American sub-cultures in the new film “Honeydripper.” With his usual understated intelligence, Sayles uses the rhythms of the citizens of Harmony, Alabama to immerse the audience into the world of the Jim Crow south. It’s a fable about the birth of rock n’ roll-a quintessentially American subject, but with a fidelity to time and temperament that is unusual in an American director.
It’s 1950 and it’s a make or break weekend for Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge. Deep in debt, Tyrone is desperate to bring back the crowds that used to come to his place. He decides to lay off his long-time blues singer Bertha Mae, and announces that he’s hired a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, for a one night only gig in order to save the club.
Into town drifts Sonny Blake, a young man with nothing to his name but big dreams and the guitar case in his hand. Rejected by Tyrone when he applies to play at the Honeydripper, he is intercepted by the corrupt local Sheriff, arrested for vagrancy and rented out as an unpaid cotton picker to the highest bidder. But when Tyrone’s ace-in-the-hole fails to materialize at the train station, his desperation leads him back to Sonny and the strange, wire-dangling object in his guitar case. The Honeydripper lounge is all set to play its part in rock n’ roll history...Read More
Sarang Song
violence against black students and community members. Along with tending to these missions, Simone and Nessa must also tend to their relationship, an act that at times appears as daunting as their other pursuits.Miller deftly captures the difficulties faced by students coming of age amidst such a turbulent epoch. Her fictional adaptation of UCLA draws on the real life crusade undertaken by black students at this venerable university's in the 60s and 70s. Like many artists who've meditated on this period in time, Miller adapts Angela Davis as her muse, and seemingly limns out this narrative from a variety of visual representations of Davis that have become synonymous with black radicalism in the early 70s. Tn so doing, the Black Panther party's eponymous black leather jackets and berets take a back seat to women and men outfitted in lush earth tones. The lighting weaves back and forth from dusk and dawn, eloquently drawing on California's most profound natural resource, the sun, to relay the urgency and speed of these women's actions, not to mention the cauldron in which they are embedded.
The website does not list any screenings beyond February 2007, but this film is one well worth screening