This festival of films and videos by black artists from around the world runs Friday, August 2, through Thursday, August 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, and unless otherwise noted, all films will be projected from 35-millimeter prints. Following is the schedule for August 2 through 8; a complete festival schedule is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 3
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A famous song becomes a window onto the complexity and diversity of culture in Strange Fruit, Joel Katz’s fine 2001 documentary on the title jazz ballad. Written in 1938 by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, to protest lynchings (“Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”) and initially banned from radio, “Strange Fruit” was taken up by Billie Holiday and later sung by performers as varied as Archie Shepp and Tori Amos. The video’s details reveal the fabric of the times: Holiday first performed the song at the integrated Greenwich Village nightclub Cafe Society, where the doormen wore rags to parody pretentiousness; singing the song in public could attract anticommunist witch-hunters; after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage in 1953, Meeropol and his wife adopted their two young sons, who tell their story on-screen. In Hughes’ Dream Harlem, Jamal Joseph offers a spirited remembrance of Langston Hughes that includes his poetry, musical fragments, and commentary from current poets and hip-hoppers. But Joseph’s attempt to claim Hughes as “the original master rapper” effaces the poet’s distinctive calm, and the video avoids any mention of the man’s homosexuality. 117 min. (FC) Joseph will attend the screening. (4:15)
Mama Africa
Short films, program two
Yolngu Boy
- Short films, program one
