Julie Dash – Memphis Flyer

Mahershala Ali in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series saved the best for last. The month-long mini-festival concludes this week with a pair of powerhouse pictures.

The first, screening on Wednesday, October 9th at Malco Ridgeway, is the classic Daughters of the Dust. In 1991, the film won the cinematography award at Sundance Film Festival, and director Julie Dash became the first African-American woman to have her film released wide in the United States. It is a generational portrait of the women of the Gullah culture on the island of Saint Helena in South Carolina, which has preserved pre-slavery West African influences for hundreds of years.

The youngest woman, Yellow Mary (Barbara O) brings her new boyfriend to meet the family, causing a rift between her and matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), who is dead set on staying on the island and preserving the culture. The film is a dense, nonlinear, cinematic masterpiece that Beyonce has cited as a major visual influence on her Lemonade music video album.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series Concludes With Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight

Recently, I was talking to my wife about the necessity of compiling a Best Movies of the 2010s list in December. We both agreed that Moonlight would have to be somewhere near the top. Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Best Picture winner’s list of accolades is so long it has its own separate Wikipedia page. After my first viewing, I talked about that crossfade shot that drew gasps in the theater for weeks to anyone who would listen. If you’ve seen the movie, you know which one I’m talking about.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s your chance to catch up in a unique venue—outdoors on the banks of the Mississippi at the River Garden on Riverside Drive. The show will start at 7:00 p.m., and will be proceeded at 5:30 by a DJ set from Kid Maestro. The screening and concert are free, so you have no excuses to miss one of the great cinematic masterworks of the twenty-first century.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Series Concludes With Daughters of the Dust and Moonlight (2)

Robert Litsol looks for work in 1960s Paris in Med Hondo’s Soleil O

In September and October, Indie Memphis is devoting its weekly programming to the work of black artists. It ain’t easy making a low-budget movie essentially by yourself. It’s even harder if you’re black, and it’s 1965.

The programming kicks off tonight with Indie Memphis’ most enduring non-festival program, Microcinema. The program of short films by black women filmmakers from the 1980s and 1990s is guaranteed to feature movies you’ve never seen before, such as “Illusions.”

Before director Julie Dash became the first African American woman director to get theatrical distribution with 1985’s Daughters of the Dust, she made “Illusions.” That films is a 30-minute short about Ester Jeeter, a black woman in 1942 Hollywood who dubs the singing voice for a less-talented, white movie star. Also on the bill is Ngozi Onwurah’s “Coffee Colored Children,” about mixed-race families facing prejudice in America. The show is a Crosstown Theater, and tickets are free, but RSVP is requested.

Ngozi Onwurah’s ‘Coffee Colored Children’

On Wednesday, Malco Ridgeway will screen a world cinema classic, Soleil O. Director Med Hondo, who just passed away last spring, spent four years crafting this $30,000 film about the plight of African immigrants from Mauritania, the former French colony in Africa. He self-financed most of the picture by translating and dubbing American films into French, and released it to great acclaim at Cannes in 1970. The film will be introduced by Rhodes College professor Dr. Abou Bakar Memah, who will help contextualize the world of post-colonial 1960s France where Hondo worked. You can get tickets at the Indie Memphis website.

Indie Memphis’ Black Independence Film Series Begins Tonight (2)