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Presented in cooperation with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival
Charles Burnett has been making movies for almost three decades, chronicling everyday lives in black families and communities. His strongly independent vision embraces humankind, so that the breakdowns and breakouts in families and by individuals--fathers, wives, brothers, cops--that he so provocatively and richly details are those of Everyman and Everywoman.
Multitalented, Burnett has often produced, directed, written, edited, and filmed his own, very idiosyncratic work. KILLER OF SHEEP (1977), the powerful story of a slaughterhouse worker who tries to make more of his life than merely a waitingroom for death, first brought Burnett honors and attention. His mainstream success first came in 1990: TO SLEEP WITH ANGER starred Danny Glover in a highly praised family-dynamics drama full of horror-movie unease: a malignant Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? featuring a genial devil (Glover) as an initially welcome guest.
Special Thanks to the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, the Disney Channel and especially to David Manson for allowing us to include NIGHTJOHN in this series.
NIGHTJOHN
Charles Burnett, 1996; 103 minutes
NIGHTJOHN is the compelling story of a nearly legendary slave who gives up freedom in order to teach fellow slaves how to read and write--forbidden fruit in the antebellum South. The film is narrated by Sarny, a young slave girl (Allison Jones). The child charged with spitting tobacco juice on flowers to keep the bugs down tells the story of her life and the man who opened up the world to her by giving her the great gift of literacy. Carl Lumbly is Nightjohn; this superb stage and screen actor has previously been seen in South Central and Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. With an excellent supporting cast, including Beau Bridges as the autocratic plantation owner, Lorraine Toussaint as Sarny's "adoptive" mother, and Bill Cobbs as the bitter, prophesying Old Man.
Friday, January 31: 2 and 6:15 pm
Saturday, February 1: 6:30 pm
Sunday, February 2: 6:15 pm
Monday, February 3: 8:30 pm
Tuesday, February 4: 2 and 8 pm
Friday, February 7: 8:45 pm
Saturday, February 8: 6:15 pm
Sunday, February 9: 4:15 pm
Tuesday, February 11: 8:30 pm
Wednesday, February 12: 8:15 pm
Thursday, February 13: 8:45 pm
MY BROTHER'S WEDDING
(writer/director/cinematographer,
1984; 110 minutes)
"My Brother's Wedding is a tragic comedy that takes place in South Central Los Angeles. The story focuses on a young man who hasn't made much of his life as of yet, and at a crucial point in his life, he is unable to make the proper decision, a sober decision, a moral decision. This is a consquence of his not having developed beyond the embryonic stage, socially. He has a distinct romantic notion about life in the ghetto and yet, in spite of his naive sensitivity, he is given the task of being his brother's keeper; he feels rather than sees, and as a consequence his capacity for judging things off in the distance is limited. This brings about circumstances that weave themselves into a set of complexities which Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), the main character, desperately tries to avoid." --
Charles Burnett
"During the course of the film, young Pierce Mundy interacts with a wide cross-section of characters, whose cumulative effect is to create a portrait of the community at large. [His] problem is most sharply outlined when, on the day of the title, he must choose between family and friendship, and take an important step in his own development. Mr. Burnett...convey[s] the essential decency of Pierce. The best performance in the film comes from Jessie Holmes, who plays Pierce's mother in a warm spontaneous style...." -- Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Saturday, February 1: 4 and 9 pm
Friday, February 7: 2, 4:15 and 6:30 pm
TO SLEEP WITH ANGER
(writer/director, 1990; 102 minutes)
"At first we seem to be in an acutely observed middle-class soap opera, witnessing the generational disputes between the family patriarch (Paul Butler) and his wife (Mary Alice), and their two married sons (Richard Brooks and Carl Lumbly).... Enter Harry (Danny Glover), a smiling charmer from the old days in the Deep South.... Is Harry in fact an evil spirit, seting a curse upon the house?... Glover, in what may be the best role of his film career, makes him an unforgettable trickster, both frightening and a little pathetic...a catalyst to explore the conflicting systems of belief--Christian, magical, materialistic--that collide with wonderfully resonant incongruity throughout the movie." -- David Anson, Newsweek
Sunday, February 2: 4 and 8:45 pm
"All you see is this happy-go-lucky person who's always nice to you. They're the kind of people that--I don't know whether it's bad karma, or what--
things sort of fall apart whenever they show up somewhere, even if it's just coincidence or accident or whatever. Trouble just follows them. Every family has someone who fits that description. So I wanted to do a character who was based on a folkloric character--the trickster--who embodied this type of person who is seen as evil, but isn't evil. The trickster figure always has so many dimensions, and is viewed in so many different ways. So I wanted the character of Harry [Mention] to have that kind of ambiguity."
-- Charles Burnett, on TO SLEEP WITH ANGER
Saturday, February 8: 8:15 pm
Sunday, February 9: 6:30 pm
Wednesday, February 12: 2, 4 and 6:15 pm
KILLER OF SHEEP
(writer/director/cinematographer,
1977; 87 minutes)
KILLER OF SHEEP won the Critics' Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981, four years after Burnett had written, produced, directed, shot and edited this gritty slice of life as it is mostly endured by a Watts slaughterhouse employee and his family. KILLER also picked up top prize at the Sundance Fest in 1981, but was never commercially released. Burnett's second feature focuses on everyday details as a hard-working meat-packer gets laid off, yet turns down a lucrative offer to assist a couple of hitmen, and tries to remain a loving husband and father in an environment that blights the soul. "This is a good film," testifies Roger Ebert. "It made me feel that I knew its people a little, and respected them. It caught the lives of the children with a fidelity to how kids really do fight, play, and cry--and how they can sometimes be cruel simply because they're so scared. It ends with Dinah Washington singing 'Unforgettable,' and the film's images bring to those lyrics some altogether unexpected meanings."
Friday, January 31: 4 and 8:45 pm
Monday, February 3: 2, 4 and 6:15 pm
Tuesday, February 4: 4 pm
BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS
(Director: Billy Woodberry, Charles Burnett: writer/cinematographer, 1984; 80 minutes)
This independently produced domestic drama features a talented cast of unknowns in a story that truly needs to be seen rather than described. Nate Hardman plays a black, unemployed Watts resident. At home most of the day, Hardman gets on the nerves of his wife (Kaycee Moore) and three children. One evening, while getting some fresh air, Hardman makes the acquaintance of a welfare mother. After this, he's not underfoot at home any more; he's found another bed to occupy. BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS transcends its nonexistent budget with believable performances and a compelling plotline. -- Corel All-Movie Guide
"The strong vision of Charles Burnett
fused with those of
Haile Gerima and
Billy Woodberry,
respectively, in
Bush Mama and Bless Their Little Hearts. Together with Killer
of Sheep, these films define the historical poetics of the Los Angeles school...
[which was preoccupied] with redefining the relationship of history to the
structure of
the family."
-- Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema
(BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS is shown with THE HORSE, a boy's coming-of-age story, written and directed by
Burnett, 1973, 18 minutes)
Tuesday, February 4: 6 pm
Wednesday, February 5: 2 and 4 pm
Thursday, February 6: 2 and 4
AMERICA BECOMING
(director/co-writer, with Dai Sil
Kim-Gibson, 1991; 90 minutes)
"...a richly layered, sometimes moving and often thorny story." -- John Koch, The Boston Globe
"The making of the film was contentious: its producers, the Ford Foundation, imposed a harmonious interpretation of this new immigrant experience on the work, whereas Burnett saw the experience as conflictual and crisis-ridden." -- Manthia Diawara, Black American Cinema
Taking its title from a poem by Langston Hughes, AMERICA BECOMING looks at the United States as the country becomes increasingly diverse, evolving from a primarily white into a multicultural society of diverse colors and nationalities. How is the nation relating to new waves of migration from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America? AMERICA BECOMING documents the lives and relationships of America's newcomers and established residents in six communities: Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Miami, Monterey Park, California, and Garden City, Kansas.
Saturday, February 8: 4:15 pm
Sunday, February 9: 8:30 pm
THE GLASS SHIELD
(writer/director, 1995; 110 minutes)
Michael Boatman plays a young, naive black man who is the first of his race to be assigned to the Los Angeles Edgemar station, located in the heart of the beleaguered inner city. He finds himself in a precinct where violent, racist and corrupt cops have closely bonded against outsiders or any interference. The new recruit's only ally is the sole woman (Lori Petty) in the Edgemar ranks. Burnett's hard-hitting film examines what it really means to be persona non grata in one's chosen profession and community, and what a man will give up to fit in. (With Richard Anderson, Michael Ironside, Bernie Casey, Elliott Gould, Ice Cube, et al.)
Thursday, February 13: 2, 4:15 and 6:30 pm
O, let America be America again--
The land that never
has been--
And yet must be.
-- Langston Hughes
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival was created to enhance public awareness of domestic and international human rights issues and specific human rights abuses, drawing on the power of film to communicate across borders, both physical and ideological. Human Rights Watch promotes respect for human rights by conducting regular, systematic investigations of human rights abuses in some seventy countries around the world. It addresses the human rights practices of governments of all political stripes, of all geopolitical alignments, and of all ethnic and religious persuasions. In internal wars it documents violations by both governments and rebel groups. Human Rights Watch defends freedom of thought and expression, due process and equal protection of the law; it documents and denounces murders, disappearances, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, exile, censorship and other abuses of internationally recognized human rights.
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