My review was even published at indiewire blog Shadow & Act
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Why I Loved ‘Mother of George’
Every time I see a detailed film about a specific culture in the back of my mind I think that it would be great if we had a film steeped in black culture.
For instance I’m fan of Italian American filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. When you view their work, where it deals with their culture, it oozes their culture. Not in any overt way, but in an organic way.
There’s a famous story of Martin Scorsese taking his idea for his 1973 film Mean Streets to renegade filmmaker Roger Corman to finance. Corman said he would finance the film if he made all of his characters black to capitalize on the blaxploitation trend at the time. Scorsese said that this is a film about Italian Americans and completed what is now considered a classic film—elsewhere. I applaud Scorsese for sticking to his guns in order to represent his culture.
In the famous scene that starts off the 1972 classic The Godfather, there is a festive Italian wedding that is also authentic to the culture. The scene showed the poste (the bag the bride holds at the reception to collect gifts), the tarantella (folk dancing) and someone at the buffet table throwing a sandwich to his friend in the back of the crowd, the reason these receptions were sometimes called “football weddings”.
Personally I think it takes someone specific to the culture to emulate that culture. These little nuances mean a lot to the Italian American culture and surely something only an Italian American director could depict with a good degree of accuracy.
In my review for Mother of George I stated “Cinematographer Bradford Young explained in the Q&A after the film that he and the director [Andrew] Dosunmu, fought and poured over every frame of that sequence because it was important, as it represented the culture, the motherland; and all of their work shows.”
I appreciated all of their hard work and hopefully audiences will feel the same.
Read my full review of Mother of George here
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See photos from the Closing Night presentation by the Director and Cinematographer of Mother of George below
(Photos by Jason Putsche)
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RELATED LINKS
Read all industry related news about Mother of George including "How the Film 'Mother of George' Got Made" at our sista blog Cool Black Media here
UPDATE AUGUST 2013
In my review of Mother of George I said
Stunning is kind of an understatement to explain the opening of the film, as it has one of the most beautiful traditional Yoruba wedding ceremonies ever captured on film. Cinematographer Bradford Young explained in the Q&A after the film that he and the director Dosunmu, fought and poured over every frame of that sequence because it was important, as it represented the culture, the motherland; and all of their work shows.Below you can get a taste of what I mean as some, and I mean some, of the wedding is shown in the trailer. You really have to see the wedding scene in its entirety when the film opens in theaters on September 13, 2013.
Read more reaction to the trailer at Shadow & Act at here
UPDATE: AUGUST 13, 2013
NEW POSTER
UPDATE: DECEMBER 2014
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