OPENING NIGHT -SATURDAY, APRIL 12 @ 7PM

HONEYDRIPPER

Donnie L. Betts (the Making of Honeydripper)

In attendance

Director: John Sayles

USA 2007
LANGUAGE: English
Length: 126 mins
Rating: PG-13

Iconoclastic filmmaker John Sayles, in his 16th feature film, continues his extraordinary examination of the complexities and shifting identities of American sub-cultures in the new film “Honeydripper.” With his usual understated intelligence, Sayles uses the rhythms of the citizens of Harmony, Alabama to immerse the audience into the world of the Jim Crow south. It’s a fable about the birth of rock n’ roll-a quintessentially American subject, but with a fidelity to time and temperament that is unusual in an American director.

It’s 1950 and it’s a make or break weekend for Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover), the proprietor of the Honeydripper Lounge. Deep in debt, Tyrone is desperate to bring back the crowds that used to come to his place. He decides to lay off his long-time blues singer Bertha Mae, and announces that he’s hired a famous guitar player, Guitar Sam, for a one night only gig in order to save the club.

Into town drifts Sonny Blake, a young man with nothing to his name but big dreams and the guitar case in his hand. Rejected by Tyrone when he applies to play at the Honeydripper, he is intercepted by the corrupt local Sheriff, arrested for vagrancy and rented out as an unpaid cotton picker to the highest bidder. But when Tyrone’s ace-in-the-hole fails to materialize at the train station, his desperation leads him back to Sonny and the strange, wire-dangling object in his guitar case. The Honeydripper lounge is all set to play its part in rock n’ roll history.

Sayles' portrait of Harmony does something few movies attempt by showing not the graphic, violent side of racism but the insidious, corrosive kind.

CLOSING NIGHT - SUNDAY, APRIL 20 @ 4PM

NAMIBIA: THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION

Acclaimed Director Charles Burnett in attendance

Director: Charles Burnett

Namibia, US 2007
LANGUAGE: English
Length: 161 mins
Rating:

NAMIBIA: THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERATION depicts the long struggle waged by the people of Namibia for their independence that was ultimately won with the help of Cuban military volunteers fighting in Angola. The 1987 battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in which the South African army was decisively defeated, turned the tide in the liberation struggle for all of Southern Africa. This was one of the key factors that led to Namibian Independence and the election of Sam Nujoma as Namibia 's first President and forced the white supremacist South African government to free President Nelson Mandela and to negotiate with the African National Congress.

About Charles Burnett: Wikipedia

Charles Burnett (April 13, 1944, Vicksburg, Mississippi) is a MacArthur Award-winning American filmmaker, educated at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Burnett's style is rarely violent and his most original work concentrates on the lives of the African American middle-class. He made his first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), while a graduate student at UCLA. Though it was not given a wide release at the time and remained hard-to-come-by through subsequent decades (because of its unauthorized use of music in the soundtrack), it became a touchstone film in American cinema; in 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2007, the soundtrack rights were at last cleared and the film was given a belated wide release.

Burnett has even had a day named after him — the mayor of Seattle declared February 20, 1997 as Charles Burnett Day.

We welcome him back to Seattle!