Four Black Filmmakers

In honour of Black History Month we presentt four features from Black filmmakers. With the recent upsurge of interest in the so-called "Blaxploitation" movement of the early and mid-1970s, it is important to note that there is a long and valued history of black filmmakers making gentler domestic dramas and comedies. 

6 February - The Watermelon Man

Melvin Van Peebles, USA, 1970, 97 minutes

Godfrey Cambridge and Estelle Parsons star in this pointed comedy about and upper-middle-class man who suddenly wakes up black. His formerly chummy neighbours insist he must leave, as all of the racial issues at the end of the 1960s emerge from this seemingly placid community. A landmark film, long overlooked and rarely seen.

13 February - Sugar Cane Alley

Euzhen Palcy, France/Martinique, 1984, 107 minutes. Palcy's deeply moving story of an eleven-year-old boy's trials and tribulations in a 1930s French colonial outpost with only his shrewd grandmother to look out for him, is lush, lyrical and poignant, and is regarded as a classic of the Carribean Cinema. (in french with subtitles)

20 February - Car Wash

Michael Schultz, USA, 1978, 95 minutes

One of the major black directors of the 1970s (he also directed Cooley High), Schultz's career came to grief when he helmed the Bee Gee's disasterous Sergeant Pepper film. Car Wash, however, an unqualified success. With a superb cast (including a cameo from Richard Pryor) and a dynamite soundtrack from Norman Whitfield, the film follows a few days of the life of the last hand-wash auto cleaning facility in Los Angeles. 

27 February - Eve's Bayou

Kasi Lemmons, USA, 1997, 109 minutes

Samuel L. Jackson stars as the father in this extraordinary tale of a young Louisiana girl who watches her parents' marriage gently dissolve due to her father's continuous affairs. Kasi Lemmons, in a stunning debut, uses the child's point-of-view to plunge the film into a world of magic realism where symbols, speech and action are attenuated through the imagination of a startingly insightful young person.