Dramatically Black

The Dalhousie Art Gallery honours African Heritage Month with four films that are in fact adaptations of stage-plays written by or about African-Americans and West Africans.

3 February - To Be Young, Gifted And Black

Michael Schultz, USA, 1972, 90 minutes

Michael Schultz (Car Wash, Cooley High) first came to prominence with this filmed version of Robert Nemiroff's play on the life (and adapted from the writings) of the groundbreaking African-American dramatist Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). Ruby Dee and Blythe Danner star.

10 February - A Raisin in the Sun

Daniel Petrie Sr., USA, 1961, 128 minutes, b & w

Lorraine Hansberry's play was the first by an African-American woman to become a hit on Broadway; it is sensitively brought to the screen by Nova Scotia's own Daniel Petrie, directing a cast that includes Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. When an impoverished black family, suddenly blessed with insurance money, seeks to acquire a house in the suburbs, the reality of equality in the USA in the early 1960s becomes brutally apparent. 

17 February - The Piano Lesson

Lloyd Richards, USA, 1995, 115 minutes. 

The Piano Lesson is the only screen adaptation of a play by America's most important living Black dramatist, August Wilson (Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom). Directed by Lloyd Richards (who directed the first version of A Raisin In The Sun on Broadway), the film tells the story of two siblings (and their families and friends) who squabble over an ancient keyboard heirloon in urban America of the late 1940s.

24 February - Hyenas

Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal, 1992, 113 minutes

West African director (Touki Bouki) Membety adapts The Visit, a play by Friedrich Durrenmatt, transplanting the characters to a village in the interior of Senegal. The film is a wicked comedy, full of acute social observations sparked by the story of a famous woman's return to her dirt-poor home village. Her only request is to exact revenge upon a man who wronged her before she left for eventual fame and fortune in the big city.