This festival of film and video by black artists from around the world continues Friday through Thursday, August 9 through 15, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State. Tickets are $8, $4 for film center members, and $3 for SAIC students. For further information, call 312-846-2800. Films marked with an * are highly recommended; unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected from 35-millimeter prints.
- Biggie & Tupac
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Julie Dash’s first feature (1991, 114 min.), set in the islands along the south Atlantic coast of the U.S. sometime around 1900. A group of black women, carrying on ancient African traditions and beliefs as part of an extended family preparing to migrate north, confront the issue of what to bring with them and what to leave behind. Lyrically distended in its folkloric meditations, with striking use of slow and slurred motion in certain interludes, this doesn’t make much use of drama or narrative, and the musical score and performances occasionally seem at war with the period ambience. But the resources of the beautiful locations are exploited to the utmost, and Dash can be credited with an original, daring, and sincere conception. With Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Adisa Anderson, Kaycee Moore, and BarbaraO, the last of whom will attend the screening. (JR) (3:00)
Kali’s Vibe
Boma-Tervuren, the Journey and Ochre and Water
Marco Williams and Whitney Dow devised an unusual approach to examining the brutal 1998 torture-murder of James Byrd Jr., an African-American man dragged to his death by three men in a truck in Jasper, Texas: during the murderers’ trial a black crew taped black residents and a white crew taped whites, underlining the racial divide between them. The history of the town creeps in: A fence had long separated white and black sections in the local cemetery. One white kid explains that the Confederate flag just means “kick-ass” and thinks blacks take it “real personal”; a nicely turned out but very obese woman criticizes Byrd’s less-than-exemplary life; meanwhile the Byrd family want the death penalty for his three killers (two of whom were covered with racist and Nazi tattoos). But nothing can really explain the opening images of a rural road stained with Byrd’s blood and flesh, which seem to make the crime’s horror irreducible. 90 min. (FC) To be projected from Beta SP video. (5:30)
Accurately described in its subtitle (“Brothers Sound Off on Relationship Issues”), Cheryl R. Matlock’s video Keepin It Real (2001) makes its talking-head shots more austere by blurring the background, which focuses one’s attention on the words. Nine African-American men describe a variety of experiences (“A good nasty girl, [but] when she found Jesus . . . all of the good times stopped”), but a frequent theme is the attack on black masculinity by everyone from domineering mothers to brutal police; one man thinks women are attracted to “thugs” as an alternative to “pookified” men. The sometimes amateurish acting can’t sustain LaTonya Croff’s video drama A Second Chance (2001), in which a woman with an abusive past is reluctant to love another man; the spontaneity required for the street talk at the opening is utterly lacking. 71 min. (FC) Matlock and Croff will attend the screening. (7:45)
