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August 3, 2012
2013Documentary1

Capoeira: Fly Away Beetle

By Indie Means Necessary

The BlackStar Film Festival is an annual celebration of the visual and storytelling traditions of the African diaspora and of global indigenous communities, showcasing films by black people from around the world.

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  • “As an artist, I have a responsibility to reach as many people as I can. And I wanted to make a film about certain kinds of people, who aren’t necessarily considered “box office,” and then have those people come to see the film. That was very important to me. I don’t see the point of preaching to the converted. We have to have dialogue. Otherwise, we’re just sort of navel-gazing.” — “Widows” director, Steve McQueen. . . Have y’all seen #widowsmovie? . . Source: @nytimes
  • #Bornonthisday Barry Jenkins! @bandrybarry won the Academy Award for Best Writing Adapted Screenplay for “Moonlight”; on writing the adaptation, @hollywoodreporter noted that, “In the original pages, the three versions of Chiron — boy, teen, adult — all interacted with one another. Jenkins proposed a new structure: Give each his own chapter. He and Tarell Alvin McCraney began exchanging what Jenkins calls "loopy emails" as Jenkins tried to persuade McCraney to write the screenplay: "I explained what I saw as the film version, but I'm a straight man and I felt Tarell's voice needed to be preserved." By then, though, McCraney had received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and his playwriting career was in high gear with his Brother/Sister Plays trilogy. So he gave Jenkins his blessing to attempt a screenplay on his own, and Jenkins went off to Brussels — "Friends told me Brussels was the most boring place in Europe in the summer and I would have no distractions" — and in 10 days, the first draft of Moonlight came flowing out of him.” . . Swipe to see some behind the scenes photos from the filming of “Moonlight.” . . 📷: David Bornfriend/A24
  • “For black girls, onscreen representation remains scarce or stereotypical, but Jinn gives audiences a powerful heroine. She's imperfect yet open to learning about herself. Summer joins characters like the conflicted girls of Jim McKay's Our Song, a 2000 movie about friends who drift away from each other through life's many changes. We can also see traces of Summer's self-reliance in Troy (Zelda Harris), the main character of Spike Lee's semi-autobiographical 1994 drama Crooklyn. It's there, too, in the open manner of Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson) as she tells both those around her and the audience about her plans to go to college in Leslie Harris' groundbreaking 1993 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” — @npr @jinnthemovie_ is currently in theaters, on VOD and Digital HD.
  • Barry Jenkin’s “If Beale Street Could Talk” will be debuting December 14 in New York and Los Angeles and expanding on December 25. The film was originally slated for a November 30 release. Swipe to see stills from the movie starring Stephan James, Kiki Layne and Regina King. On what James Baldwin means to him, Jenkins said, “Everything. I had never read the work of any queer author—not knowingly. And then to find that here was this young, black voice that grew up poor, like me, and somehow created this language to express everything—to talk not only about himself, but about people outside himself, in such an eloquent way. It opened my worldview a bit because I had a very limited opinion of what I was capable of, and reading Baldwin showed me that maybe there is more. I could expand the box of possibility for myself. When you grow up in a certain way, whether you grow up impoverished or just isolated, you think that you can only speak to a very finite existence. I feel like reading someone like Baldwin, I was like “No.” What I love about Baldwin is he didn’t have to run away from his culture to speak on the culture at large. Even more than that, he used his unique perspective to bring a unique perspective to the culture at large.”
  • Good news! On November 20, Terence Nance will be at Swarthmore College for a screening and discussion. Selections include the short “They Charge for the Sun,” the documentary “Triptych” with artist Sanford Biggers, and episodes of Nance’s HBO series, “Random Acts of Flyness.” ——————————————————————————- 🎥 New Black Film Aesthetics: An Evening with Terence Nance 📅 Tues. Nov. 20, 7pm 📍 Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema 500 College Ave, Swarthmore, PA . . . 📷: Brad Oggonna for the @nytimes
  • Letitia Wright was selected by @hollywoodreporter as one of the breakout stars for their Next Gen issue. One of her upcoming projects is “The Convent,” a West End play written by fellow Wakandan Danai Gurira (Wright plays a girl who converts to Catholicism in 19th century Africa). . . Source: @hollywoodreporter
  • RaMell Ross’ award winning documentary, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” will be screening in Philly! Shot over five years, the film, in title and method, remaps time as a way of reorienting the viewer’s relationship not just to the South, but to Ross’s black subjects, too. Following the stories of two young African American men, Daniel and Quincy, with whom he became acquainted when he worked as their GED and workforce readiness teacher, Ross consciously tried to re-create the mundane, the banal, or the quiet moments that he experienced working with and learning from his students. ________________________________________________ 📅 Nov 12, 6:30 - 9:30pm 📍 Annenberg Center for Performing Arts’ Zellerbach Theater 🎫 FREE and open to the public Post screening discussion with: Danny Glover, Joslyn Barnes, Robb Moss ________________________________________________ How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives, and humanity originate in exploitation? In “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” photographer and filmmaker @ramellross employs the integrity of nonfiction filmmaking and the currency of stereotypical imagery to fill in the gaps between individual black male icons. The film is a lyrical innovation to the form of portraiture that boldly ruptures racist aesthetic frameworks that have historically constricted the expression of African American men on film.
  • Ruth E. Carter is currently doing research for “Dolemite Is My Name!,” a biopic about the comedian Rudy Ray Moore. She’s consulting YouTube and Ebony’s online archive as well as her vast personal collection of Sears catalogs. The film stars Eddie Murphy as the comic Moore, and Carter has nearly 80 changes to prepare for him. Moore’s personal style was exuberantly louche: hats that matched his shoes, swaths of fur and snakeskin, star-shaped shades. “Really pimp-style,” she adds. “But I tell my team, we’re not going to be dependent on what we have in our minds about the ’70s. I pride myself on accuracy. We need to know the difference between how people dressed in a juke joint or on the chitlin circuit or in small clubs, the difference between Indiana and the South and California. So when they go to the George Foreman fight and everybody’s all dressed up, I’m not trying to make it silly. Another designer might want you to laugh. Maybe stop at the big Afro, platform shoes, crazy wild patterns, polyester. Instead, I’m taking it very seriously and saying, This is fabulous. We were coming out of the 1960s, civil rights, and showing a sense of pride in ourselves. When I dress these guys, I’m focusing on that.” ________________________________________________ In late summer the first retrospective of Carter’s work, beginning with Do the Right Thing, opened at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh; Marvel lent nine costumes from Black Panther. And this fall she is busy with a 25-university lecture tour called “Concepts to Creation,” in which she takes college students through the process of designing the #BlackPanther wardrobe. . . 📷: Ethan James Green for @wsjmag