Cinematically Celebrating Black History
This February, two major film institutions – a filmfest and movie museum – in Los Angeles, the world capital of cinema, honored Black History Month with screenings, presentations, panel discussions and more. Here’s the first of a two-part series.
Part I: THE PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL
Honoring the Man n the Hood
At the “FX’s SNOWFALL - Legacy of John Singleton” panel on the last day of the Pan African Film Festival, I asked Snowfall co-star Gail Bean: “Snowfall is one of the best programs in television history. It dramatizes how the CIA sold crack cocaine to the Black community in order to finance the dirty wars in Central America. In the fifth season, Leon [Isaiah John] expressed an interest in becoming a revolutionary. Is that storyline continued in Snowfall’s last season?”
“Yes, it is, but like every sad story, there are obstacles,” replied Bean, who portrays Wanda Bell, a young woman who became crack addicted and was the lover of the increasingly politically radicalized drug dealer Leon in the gritty, groundbreaking series. Later Bean said that, “Snowfall is not the story of Freeway Ricky Ross,” one of the real-life central figures of the Reagan regime’s Iran-Contra scandal. Bean added, “He was not the only one the government used” in the CIA’s conspiracy to fund the Contra war against leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua with the money made by selling arms to Iran and crack cocaine to predominantly African American communities like L.A.’s South Central, where much of the series – like Singleton’s movies – were shot on location, injecting jobs and cash into local communities.
Also on the PAFF panel at Baldwin Hills in South L.A.’s Cinemark Baldwin Hills & XD theaters was producer Sherri Sneed, who’d worked on Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X and John Singleton’s 1993 Poetic Justice, starring Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur and Regina King. Sneed was full of praise for Singleton, who at the age of 24 became the youngest person and first Black talent ever Oscar-nominated for Best Director for 1991’s Boyz n the Hood, which was also Oscar-nommed in a Best Writing category. Unfortunately, Singleton died before his time in 2019, but as the panel noted, his life’s work is being remembered and perpetuated by the PAFF/City of Los Angeles John Singleton Short Film Competition, which Sneed executive produces, is funded by L.A. and awarded by PAFF, and the winners’ films are screened at PAFF. The John Singleton Scholarship for the Arts at USC supports students of color pursuing an arts education at USC, where he’d studied at its School of Cinematic Arts. There is also reportedly a new John Singleton room at the FX studios and a short filmed tribute honoring Singleton was screened at the PAFF panel. Of course, Singleton’s creative and political vision is best honored by the series he co-created, Snowfall, which kicked its sixth and final season off on FX on Feb. 22.
John Singleton (Photo: Koi Sojer/Snap’N U Photos)
Many stories about Singleton were shared during the PAFF panel, so I’ll tell you mine, as it took place during PAFF. In 2015 I attended a PAFF screening of Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Singleton sat a couple of seats down the row from me. I vividly remember his facial expressions during the documentary – the bolder and more militant Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, et al, became, the more visibly delighted Singleton was. His face was lit up with joy as the Panthers fought the power. After the screening I wanted to tell John how much I enjoyed his movies – but he was with others, and I didn’t want to intrude on his privacy. But now, it’s too late to tell him, as he’s gone all too soon at the age of 51. Alas!
PAFF Overview
In any case, the panel epitomized what the Pan African Film Festival – America’s largest, Black-themed filmfest of features, documentaries, shorts, animation, indies, studio productions, etc., as well as panels, an ARTFest, SpokenWord Fest and Fashion Show at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in the mall adjoining the Cinemark Baldwin Hills & XD theaters, where most of PAFF’s films were screened – is all about. True to form, at this year’s fest, with the theme “PAFF Reimagined, Experience a New Story,” as part of a program of shorts the 40-minute documentary America Justice on Trial People v. Newton, about the Panthers’ co-founder and Minister of Defense, was screened. (PAFF’s Executive Director and co-founder Ayuko Babu is a former Panther who knew Huey P. Newton.)
Sherri Sneed, Gail Bean, and Jasmyne Cannick (Photo: Photo: Koi Sojer/Snap’N U Photos)
Other personal highlights of the 31st annual PAFF - with reportedly over 150 films from 40 countries, in 19 languages, including 50 World and 22 North American debuts – including relatively big budget productions, such as the world premiere of Fox’s Searchlight Pictures’ Chevalier: The Untold True Story, a period piece about the “Black Mozart” which kicked PAFF off on opening night, and smaller independent films. I focused on the latter and here are some capsule reviews.
Recommended for You
The Five Demands
The struggle for open admissions for the City University of New York system, which included City College, is at the heart of this stellar stand-up-and-cheer documentary by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss. Although City College, with its Ivy League- style buildings, was located in Harlem, admission policies excluded most Blacks and Puerto Ricans from the surrounding community and beyond from attending the prestigious, mostly white college. As this exciting 74-minute nonfiction film shows, this all changed when militant minority protesters and radical white student allies staged a dramatic takeover of the upper Manhattan campus in 1969, leading to a new CUNY policy empowering all high school graduates to attend college tuition free. I myself was a beneficiary of this revolt in higher learning, which enabled me to go to Hunter College and major in Cinema, even though I only had a 78 average.
The Five Demands (Courtesy of PAFF)
This film brought back memories to this “Native” New Yorker – the clips of Rep. Shirley Chisholm, Mayor Lindsay, etc. – yet I also learned a lot I’d never known before. The stirring, superb doc was followed by an excellent discussion which included: Author Dorothy Randall Gray, one of the City College activists interviewed in The Five Demands; the filmmakers; esteemed intellectual Dr. Julianne Malveaux, Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies, California State University; and panel organizer Aminah Bakeer Abdul-Jabbaar, Associate Professor, Pan African Studies, California State University.
Little Richard: I Am Everything
The L.A. premiere of Lisa Cortes’ exuberant, jubilant portrait of the rock icon is an absolute, sheer delight! The musician, born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Georgia in 1932, shaped rock ’n’ roll as it emerged in the 1950s with his raucous piano playing, outrageous lyrics and even more outlandish, out-of-the-closet-and-into-the-sheets style. This nonfiction biopic includes great archival footage with Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and other legends plus insiders who knew the mythic rocker, as well as original interviews, that bring Little Richard alive, in living color (pancake makeup and all!). His performances of classics like “Tutti Frutti” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” will make you shake, rattle and roll (whereas Pat Boone’s cringeworthy covers to make them “acceptable” for “mainstream” – i.e., white bread – audiences will make you want to puke, as the defanged, bowdlerized products of American apartheid).
Little Richard (Courtesy of PAFF)
Cortes, who also helmed the 2020 anti-voter suppression doc All In: The Fight for Democracy, has a great cinematic sensibility. Her astonishing montages, set to Little Richard’s songs, would make Sergei Eisenstein’s eyes pop, as they filmically capture the quintessence of the musician’s unique aural and visual panache, sprinkled with a dash of pixie dust. Little Richard: I Am Everything also depicts the eponymous stars conflicted sexuality, as he went back and forth between his flaming homosexuality (“Great Balls of Fire”, as Richard’s contemporary Jerry Lee Lewis, would put it!), religiosity, and “the devil’s music.” Somewhere between these polar opposites, seasoned by racism, lies the source of much of American rock music, from Little Richard to Elvis. The excellent documentary also reveals a lot about the South and the music industry’s exploitation of “The Originator.” This 88-minute romp is simply a must see/must hear for all fans of rock – and of top-notch documentaries. Good Golly, Miss Molly indeed!!!
We Are Still Here (Courtesy of PAFF)
We Are Still Here
One of the great things about PAFF is that it has an internationalist perspective, from America to Mother Africa to Oceania and beyond. We Are Still Here is an omnibus-style feature film by 10 Native directors who, in about 8 segments, tell the tale of the conquest of the Indigenous peoples of what are now known as Australia and New Zealand. Although the various episodes span centuries and seem disjointed and different, they are in fact unified by a single overriding theme and concept: The Aboriginal Australian and Maori perspective, when confronted by white settler colonialism of their Native homelands, and the Indigenous peoples’ resistance to this encroachment. Whether it’s a Maori in the trenches at Gallipoli during WWI or a contemporary Aboriginal man being rousted by white security guards or graffiti artists in urban NZ, Natives cope with and defy the dominant majority culture. Unique animation is creatively used to evoke the first contact between Pacific Islanders and the British.
Biking While Black (Courtesy of PAFF)
Closer to home, Yolanda Davis Overstreet’s nonfiction shorts Biking While Black has a similar sensibility, chronicling, among other things, what African American bicycle riders must contend with in racist urban America . But whereas the oppressed in We Are Still Here are Indigenous people living in ancestral homelands turned into white settler states by invading outsiders, in America most Blacks are descended from enslaved transplants, forcibly wrenched out of their homes and coerced during the Middle Passage to travel across the Atlantic to serve as forced labor, strangers in a strange land. Which is worse??? The great thing about PAFF, from films about Huey Newton to Little Richard to Maoris and beyond, is that Angelenos get to see motion pictures they otherwise might not have an opportunity to enjoy. And this year, the Festival has been virtually extended and some of the many films can be seen through March 31.
For more info see Pan African Film Festival.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
