My 2015 Maryland Film Festival Experience [VIDEOS]

Last year for the Maryland Film Festival was totally surreal. The festival started three days after the curfew was lifted following the Baltimore Riots (also called the Freddie Gray riots, the Baltimore Uprising, the Baltimore Unrest etc). It was a tumultuous time in Baltimore. Baseball games were being played without crowds, people were afraid to come into the city, the police were still dealing with after effects of the unrest. It was a heck of a time to have a film festival, but MFF did and I was a part of it.

In the midst of the turmoil, I wrote what is becoming an annual article for indiewire blog Shadow & Act 2015 Maryland Film Festival Kicks Off This Week (May 6-10) - Black Films to Put on Your To-See List  detailing the films playing at the festival featuring black personnel (cast, subject or crew).

At the festival, one of the first feature films I saw was also a surreal moment. As I said then "Do The Right Thing in Baltimore a week after the Baltimore Riots"

Seeing that classic film that captured racial strife so brilliantly a week after the riots was just wild. It was quite a somber moment in the city at that time and this screening was equally somber.

The next day I attended a great panel, "A Work in Progress: Writing Race". As the Baltimore Sun put it:

In the wake of unrest in Baltimore, a panel discussion [A Work in Progress: Writing Race] at this week's Maryland Film Festival will feature four notable writers whose works touch on Baltimore, race or some combination thereof:  "The Wire" creator David Simon; Pulitzer Prize winner and Baltimore writer Taylor Branch; National Book Award winner James McBride; and essayist and commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, a National Magazine Award-winning editor at Atlantic magazine.

From Left to Right: Ta-Nehisi Coates & David Simon

All four men are working on the script for the upcoming HBO mini-series, "America in the King Years," which is being produced for HBO by Simon's Blown Deadline Productions. It is based on Branch's three-volume history of the Civil Rights movement.

(You can see video of the "A Work in Progress: Writing Race" panel at the end of this post.)

That next day it was my pleasure to introduce the film Girlhood at the festival.

I really loved that film and it was my pleasure to present it to the MFF audience. You can read my review of Girlhood here )

I was planning on seeing several other films after Girlhood, but I was asked to do this.

CLICK for a bigger view

BREAKING NEWS: MFF announces a discussion about filmmaker responsibility and engagement with the community from 3pm-4pm in the Tent Village!  All Tent Village panels are FREE and open to the public!  Our Tent Village is located in the east lot at the MICA Lazarus Center (131 W North Avenue).

This panel will feature Stanley Nelson, director of MFF 2015's THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION; Steve Hoover, director of MFF 2015's CROCODILE GENNADIY; Ramona Diaz, director of DON'T STOP BELIEVIN': EVERYMAN'S JOURNING; and Chip Dizard, director of OH, BALTIMORE.  The panel will be moderated by Dankwa Brooks, Multi-award winning writer and director of MAKING HISTORY.

I guess it was my turn to be on a panel LOL, but a chance to moderate a panel with a filmmaker I admired–no brainer! 

I had a chance to hang out with Stanley Nelson before the panel at the festival and it was really a great moment. The panel went really great as well as our filmmakers had great answers about filmmaker responsibility and community engagement.

Top left to right: Stanley Nelson and Dankwa Brooks

Bottom left to right: Steve Hoover, Chip Dizard and Ramona Diaz

We covered issues like telling your story without exploitation and more. A really great discussion.

Later on that evening was the Maryland Film Festival premiere of

Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

Of course I was right there, it was another great film by Mr. Nelson and I wasn't the only one to think so! Here’s video of the audience reaction from the 'Nother Brother Entertainment Facebook page.

(I wrote more about Mr. Nelson on the 'Nother Brother Entertainment blog here )

So as you can see I had an extremely busy time at the 2015 Maryland Film Festival and even though it was busy it was still a blast!

 You can see all of our posts about the Maryland Film Festival here

Master Documentarian Stanley Nelson

So I was looking for some films to see at the 2010 Maryland Film Festival decided to see Freedom Summer and WOW! I was really blown away by this film.

As I said back in 2010 "The official website’s description “powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story” is absolutely right." I also said "Excellent work by the filmmaker Stanley Nelson and makes me want to check out his other work." And that's what I did! I watched his film Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006) and another excellent work!

When his next film came to the Maryland Film Festival 2014’s Freedom Summer I KNEW I had to see it and meet the man.The below picture is right after I saw Freedom Summer.


Freedom Summer was another excellent film and of course last year when his latest film was coming to the festival The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015) (Poster below)

I actually got a chance to hang out with Mr. Nelson last year, but that’s a story for later. I urge you to check out the works of this “Master Documentarian”.

Here are some of the titles from his filmography (hyperlinks lead to more of what I said about the films here on the blog)

Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind (2000)
The Murder of Emmett Till (2003)
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
Freedom Riders (2010)
Freedom Summer (2014)
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015)

What’s Mr. Nelson’s next films? Let him tell you via the tweets below

My next film is a 2 hr doc on the history of #HBCUs. A first ever. Follow the production at @HBCUrising. #BlackPanthersPBS

— Stanley Nelson (@StanleyNelson1) February 17, 2016

.@DrRPBenjamin Thank you! My next film after a doc on #HBCUs will look at economics of Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, btw.

— Stanley Nelson (@StanleyNelson1) February 26, 2016

It goes without saying that I’m looking forward to BOTH films!

APRIL 2016 

Emmy-winning nonfiction filmmaker Stanley Nelson will be honored at the upcoming 75th Annual Peabody Awards.

The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards) program, recognizes distinguished and meritorious public service by American radio and television stations, networks, online media, producing organizations, and individuals.

A prolific documentary filmmaker, a seeker of truth and justice, Stanley Nelson Jr. has examined the history and experience of African-Americans in a powerful, revelatory body of work that includes three Peabody winners–The Murder of Emmet Till, Freedom Summer and Freedom Riders —and ranges from Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple to Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice. A MacArthur Genius Fellow, Nelson is also co-founder of Firelight Media, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing young documentary filmmakers who advance underrepresented stories.

 Read more about Mr. Nelson in a 2011 New York Times article below.

___________________________________________________

An Explorer of Black History’s Uncharted Terrain

Stanley Nelson

Mike Hale, New York Times
May 3, 2011

FOR some people, filmmaking is a lifelong dream. For Stanley Nelson, it began as more of a situational thing, a response to time and place. The time was the late 1960s and early ’70s, the place to be avoided was Vietnam, the refuge was film school at the City University of New York. “It was kind of my motive to stay in school no matter what, you know what I’m saying?”

In some ways Mr. Nelson, whose graying hair is the only thing that betrays his 59 years, has been in school ever since. An accomplished director and producer of documentaries, primarily for television — his latest film,“Freedom Riders,” makes its debut on Monday night as part of the PBS series “American Experience” — he has spent his career exploring the byways of black history and culture, and passing along the stories he finds.

“I feel like I’m trying to tell African-American audiences something they haven’t heard,” he said, “because I feel like if I tell African-American audiences something new about their history, then it’s definitely going to be new for white folks too.

“In some ways,” he continued, “I’m trying not to be that guy in ‘Tarzan’ who interprets the drums for Tarzan. I don’t want to be that person.”

“Freedom Riders” is Mr. Nelson’s first film to deal directly with the civil rights movement, and he has stayed away from the “great men” of black history: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. His subjects, in television terms, have been more everyday or more offbeat, but no less important for that: African-American newspapers, professors and vacation resorts; the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and the murder victim Emmett Till; the suicides at Jonestown; and the music of Sweet Honey in the Rock.

The breadth and seriousness of his work documenting black life in America, assembled with little fanfare and sometimes less money, place him in a select group of filmmakers that would include his mentor, William Greaves, as well as more famous names like Gordon Parks and Spike Lee. But speaking at the temporary offices of his production company, Firelight Media, on 131st Street in Harlem recently, Mr. Nelson was more the weary traveler than the auteur. He had just returned from trips to China, Houston, St. Louis and Chicago, promoting his new film, about the 1961 Freedom Rides across the South and the violent reaction they inspired.

Taking a break from his producing chores on a Firelight film about Jesse Owens, Mr. Nelson recalled the reactions to “Freedom Riders” in China.

“It was crazy,” he said, settling into a chair and commencing an off-and-on struggle to stay awake. “Some of the questions were the same as here, and some were really very, very different. One that kind of stood out was, one guy asked, ‘Why was there segregation in the U.S.?’ Which was such a beautiful question. You know, it’s so beautiful.”

Mr. Nelson’s word choices sometimes hark back to the days of peace and love, when he was an aspiring director with no interest in nonfiction (“What I knew about documentary films were those terrible documentaries that I saw in school”) and a disdain for the blaxploitation movies that constituted the movie industry’s depiction of African-Americans on-screen.

For his thesis, he made a “kind of crazy” short film about a dead woman. “I was very influenced by foreign films,” he said. “So she wakes up in the middle of a field and she goes to a psychiatrist who gives her some mumbo jumbo, and then she goes to a priest and he gives her some mumbo jumbo, and then she goes to a drug dealer and he gives her some mumbo jumbo. And then she kind of wakes up, and she’s been hit by a car.”

Out in the world, he first apprenticed with Mr. Greaves, a prolific documentary and television director and producer best known for the experimental film “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm,” and then worked for five years for the communications branch of the United Methodist Church, where, he said, he learned how to make films with a message that were still entertaining.

While there he began work on his first feature film, “Two Dollars and a Dream,” about the pioneering black businesswoman Madame C. J. Walker. The church allowed him to use its facilities for his own work one day a week. The idea came from closer to home.

“Well, my grandfather was her business partner,” Mr. Nelson said. “So the story had been circulating around my family for a long time. What’s embarrassing is that it took me so long to think of it as a film.”

It also took him a long time to make it: seven years, much of it spent raising money. The film was finally released in 1989. While conducting research on Walker, he stumbled on the subject for his next movie, “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords.”

“Here were these papers that were owned and operated by black people,” he said. “And the writers were black, and the editors were black, and the photographers were black, and the cartoonists were black. I mean, somebody was making a living as a black cartoonist in 1920 — well, how about that? That’s incredible.”

Mr. Nelson’s second film took as long to make as his first, and he suspects that has had something to do with his determination to avoid familiar topics. “It took me seven years to make Madame C. J. Walker, it took me seven years to make ‘The Black Press,’ ” he said. “So going into a film, it has to be something that is really important to me. You know, because I might be seven, eight years down the line, still working on it.”

Research for “The Black Press” led Mr. Nelson to Garvey (who published the influential newspaper Negro World), and “Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind” initiated his relationship with “American Experience,” for which he has done five projects so far, including “The Murder of Emmett Till” and “Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.” Despite the steady collaboration, each film has required a new pitch and a new negotiation. “PBS has been great, but it’s been one film after the other,” he said. “And there’s been no kind of relationship, in some terms. It’s like we meet in a bar by accident.”

“Freedom Riders” is the first film Mr. Nelson has written and directed that was not his own idea — PBS brought the project to him after optioning Raymond Arsenault’s 2006 book, “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” Asked if he had any qualms about the work for hire, Mr. Nelson laughed and said, “Well, I think they had raised all the money.”

“And I always kind of wanted to do a film about the civil rights movement, about one piece of the civil rights movement,” he added. “About dissecting a piece of it, because I think ‘Eyes on the Prize’ was a great, great, beautiful series, but it kind of made this whole lump thing of the movement.”

Mr. Nelson’s “American Experience” films can be found on DVD from shoppbs.org and other online retailers, but his other films are harder to track down. (“Two Dollars and a Dream” can be bought at filmakers.com, which caters to institutional customers, for $350.) Those with a Netflix subscription, however, have access to a special treat: “A Place of Our Own,” his best and most atypical film, is currently available for streaming.

That 2004 work, conceived as a straightforward documentary about black resort towns around the country, became a poetic and highly personal film about Mr. Nelson’s family summer home at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, his parents and siblings, and a set of issues not often aired in public: the fault lines of class, generation and skin color that exist among African-Americans.

“It was more personal than I ever realized it would be, than I ever wanted it to be, than it will ever be again,” he said of “A Place of Our Own.” He had to be persuaded — “over and over and over again” — to allow the editors to put the focus on his fractured relationship with his father and to record the wistful first-person narration that sets the film’s tone.

Part of the story it tells is of Mr. Nelson’s upper-middle-class upbringing, with a dentist father and librarian mother who sent him to a progressive private school in Manhattan and whisked him off to Martha’s Vineyard every summer. Both “pieces” of his childhood, as he calls them, were cocoonlike (to put it one way) and intensely supportive (to put it another).

They did not remove “the kind of disconnect and disassociation that I think all black people have,” he said, but they did give him “some feeling of comfort in the world.” And they informed the kind of filmmaker he would become.

“I’m just trying to make the best film that I possibly can,” he said. “I’m not carrying a lot of baggage. I’m not thinking about this or that. I’m not bitter. And that’s kind of how I see myself.”

In addition to producing the Jesse Owens film, Mr. Nelson is negotiating with PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do a connected series of films on topics including the slave trade, historically black colleges and the Black Panther party. He would like to direct a film about the Panthers, a favorite subject, himself. But there’s another topic — another subject of study — about which he seems to be even more excited.

“I’ve always wanted to do a film about James Brown,” he said. “Because I love James Brown, and I think it’s kind of this great story, and great music. I do think there’s something about that music. You know, especially for black people. You say James Brown, people start to smile. Why? Why is it that people start to smile? I’m not there yet.”

Girlhood - Review

GIRLHOOD

Written & Directed by Céline Sciamma
Produced by Produced by Bénédicte Couvreur, Rémi Burah and Olivier Père

Cinematography by Crystel Fournier

Starring    
• Karidja Touré
• Assa Sylla
• Lindsay Karamoh
• Mariétou Touré

Released: January 30, 2015 (USA)

Summary: A girl with few real prospects joins a gang, reinventing herself and gaining a sense of self confidence in the process. However, she soon finds that this new life does not necessarily make her any happier.

Review: I thought this film was an excellent examination of what happens in a girl’s life when she grows up disadvantaged and still has to find herself. This coming of age story happens in a Paris suburb, but I feel could have taken place anywhere. Marieme is just a girl who feels out of place in school and at home. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she knows it’s not anything she has. Like any good tale, her journey takes many paths, but it’s really one we haven’t seen on screen—from this perspective. The perspective of a teenage black woman.

Karidja Touré as Marieme does a really good job with the complex role that is constantly changing as her character Marieme changes. You grow to care about what happens to this young woman and her story by the end is truly one of independence. The film is also filled with strong characters especially Assa Sylla as “Lady”.

I have to mention the great cinematography of  Crystel Fournier in this film. Fournier achieved her best work with dark skinned actors in dark rooms and at night. That is a hard feat to achieve and she does it beautifully. 

This is what I wrote for the Maryland Film Festival

The writer/director of this film, Céline Sciamma, stated that her goal as a filmmaker is “to show faces and bodies that we never see on screen” and she has done just that with her wonderful third film Girlhood (Bande de filles). As writer Anupa Mistry stated “Finally, a film about black girls strengthening each other." As Mistry points out, the film has “probably the best four minutes of cinema I saw in 2014.” Without giving too much away, that scene is where you truly fall in love with the characters.

In the story, fed up with her abusive family situation, lack of school prospects and the “boys’ law” in the neighborhood, Marieme (Karidja Touré) starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. It is through her friendship with those girls that pretty much everything changes for Marieme, leading her on a turbulent path to find the love, freedom and independence she truly desires.

Girlhood (Bande de filles) premiered within the prestigious Directors' Fortnight section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and went on to screen within the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival and Sundance 2015.

I saw this film through the 2015 Maryland Film Festival and it’s simply one of the best I’ve seen this year.

You can read more about the film on IMDb here

 You can see all of our posts about the Maryland Film Festival here

My 2014 Maryland Film Festival Experience

Just in time for the 2015 film festival I’m here to share my experience from last year. LOL

I usually write on the spot reviews and post a review of my favorite film of the festival about a month after the annual festival. Last year I did not. I was exhausted. Last year I was “doing the most”.

I started a lot of it before the festival began. Starting with the MINORITIES IN FILM panel at the festival.

Pictured Left to Right: Michelle Farrell, Kim Moir, Monique Walton, Nicki Mayo, Dankwa Brooks, 

Eric R. Cotten and Darius Clark Monroe

I conceptualized the idea for the panel and brought in my friend filmmaker/Producer Eric R. Cotten to help me co-ordinate it.

Our plan was to engage the audience about what it’s like to be a minority filmmaker and the challenges we face as far as budget, staffing and resources. We want to educate the audience on resources in the region as well as production options available in the area.

Everyone on the panel was minority filmmakers from Maryland and we had two visiting filmmakers who were gracious enough to sit on the panel. Monique Walton was a Producer on the 2014 Official Selection Skunk and Darius Clark Monroe was the director of 2014 Official Selection Evolution of a Criminal.

I also wrote an article for the indiewire blog Shadow & Act about the black films playing at the 2014 Maryland Film Festival. You can read that article here

I saw a lot of great films like the ones below. (Each film is linked to their IMDb page)
•    Evolution of a Criminal
•    The Hip Hop Fellow
•    All Fall Down (formerly Baltimore in Black and White)
•    Everybody Street
•    Fight Church

My favorite film of the 2014 festival was actually the first feature film I saw. You can read about that here

As you can see before and during the festival I was doing A LOT. I still saw a lot of films and met a lot great people. I still posted lots of pics from the 2014 festival on the ‘Nother Brother Entertainment Facebook page below.

Photos from and about the Maryland Film Festival May 7-11, 2014
Posted by 'Nother Brother Entertainment on Thursday, April 10, 2014

 You can see all of our posts about the Maryland Film Festival here

My Favorite Film at the 2014 Maryland Film Festival

My favorite film of the 2014 film festival was Freedom Summer. I saw many of the other films by the director Stanley Nelson. After I saw his film Freedom Riders at the 2010 Maryland Film Festival I sought out his other films. I thought the others were excellent and Freedom Summer was no different.

I saw ‘Summer’ in May of 2014 and just last month (April 2015) it won a prestigious Peabody Award.  "Reflecting excellence in quality, rather than popularity or commercial success, the Peabody is awarded to about 25–35 winners annually"

"With archival images, animation and fresh interviews, “Freedom Summer” recalls the voter-registration “freedom rides” of 1964, a campaign planned and trained for like a Civil Rights D-Day. The documentary is not only inspiring and instructive; it holds surprises even for those who believe they know this epochal American story."—Peabody Awards

I wasn’t surprised because I loved the film. It really detailed the civil rights struggle and all that were involved.

I never got a chance to review Freedom Summer, but here is an excerpt of an excellent one by CNN.

"The goal of Freedom Summer, though, was to do more than register black voters. It was to empower blacks as well. The volunteers established Freedom Schools where they taught black Mississippians about black history. They established an interracial delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention that made a daring, nationally publicized bid to unseat Mississippi's all-white delegation.

Some of the most powerful segments in the film, though, come during its smaller moments: A burly white sheriff viciously tries to snatch an American flag out of the hands of a small black boy leaving a courthouse; the boy bravely holds on while he's swung like a rag doll. A former beauty queen from Mississippi recounts how family members were driven from their homes simply for having dinner with Freedom Summer volunteers. A boy photographed being educated in a ramshackle Freedom School explains how that summer changed the arc of his life; he is now a poised college professor and author.  

One of the film's most riveting moments comes when volunteer Linda Wetmore Halpern tells a story that, until then, she had been too embarrassed to share.

Halpern was walking alone on a Mississippi road one day in her summer dress when a group of laughing white men drove up, surrounded her, and told her they hadn't killed a white girl yet.
The men grabbed her, tied a noose around her neck and tied the noose to the car. Then they started to drive, forcing her to keep up while calling her "nigger lover." As they sped up, Halpern says, she thought she was going to die.

The men then stopped, untied the noose from the car and laughed as they drove away. Halpern stood alone in the road petrified.
"I peed all over myself," she says, her voice shaking years later. "I just stood there and peed."

As you can read there were many wrought moments like these in the documentary. You can read the full CNN review here and you can watch the trailer below.

My 2013 Maryland Film Festival Experience

It's been over a month since the 2013 Maryland Film Festival (May 8-12th) and it was a doozy. LOL. In pictures and words my weekend was:

For the record:

Starting in 1999, the Maryland Film Festival is an annual four-day event that takes place the first weekend of each May, presenting top-notch film and video work from all over the world. Each year the festival screens approximately 50 feature films and 75 short films of all varieties -- narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and hybrid -- to tens of thousands of audience members.   

 In 2013, for its fifteenth anniversary, the festival expanded to five days. 

Celebrity guest hosts from outside the world of film are also invited to present favorite films, including musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Ian MacKaye, Branford Marsalis, Will Oldham, Jonathan Richman, and Bill Callahan.

This year was the 15th Annual Maryland Film Festival. Usually there are four days of the festival, but this year there was FIVE. That means an extra day to see as many films as I could. LOL.

Because the festival expanded, my weekend started early on Wednesday with the festival’s Opening Night Shorts & Party.

Every year the festival opens with a bunch of short films and then a party. This year I wanted to repeat my full festival experience so I wanted to attend all five days and I DID! In reality the only day I spent the whole day at the festival was the last day, Sunday.

Even though I’ve been going to the MFF for nine years this was the best ever!

It started with my favorite poster design for the festival ever. As an artist I appreciate art in all its forms and I thought this design was fantastic! It really encompasses their "Film for everyone" slogan!

2013 MFF poster design. Graphic by Post Typography
(in collaboration with photographer RaRah and 3-D illustrator Jeremy Martin). 

Then I saw this announcement in one of their emails:

Maryland Film Festival (May 8-12 in downtown Baltimore) is proud to announce that acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young will co-host our 2013 Closing Night screening, presenting Oscilloscope Laboratories' Mother of George alongside director Andrew Dosunmu.  

So a filmmaker whose work I really idolized was going to be at the festival this year and hopefully I would get a chance to meet him! Did I? I wrote a separate post about that here

Again this year during the festival I also shared my experience with the people who follow ‘Nother Brother on our social networks.

Even though the stuff I tweeted is lost in the thousands of tweets in the “Twitterverse” a lot of what I posted , including pictures, are still on the ‘Nother Brother Facebook page, including ALL of my reviews EXCLUSIVELY. Well all except the BEST film I saw which for the first time was posted on Indiewire’s Shadow & Act! Indiewire is a daily news site for the independent film community and a leading source of information on independent films.

From my review of that “Best Film” from the 2013 Maryland Film Festival, “it wasn’t just the best picture I saw at the MFF this year; it is the best picture I’ve seen this year thus far. Really.” Even though my review of the "Best film" is at Shadow & Act, I did write a special epilogue for this blog and it's linked at the bottom.

Other than that “Best film” all the other reviews, some other really good films, are on the ‘Nother Brother Entertainment Facebook Page EXCLUSIVELY including the great Baltimore shot documentary 12 O’clock Boys.

Still from 12 O'clock Boys

I’ve been attending the Maryland Film Festival since 2005 and between the Best Graphic Ever, the opportunity to meet one of my filmmaking idols, some really good films spread over five days and “the best picture I’ve seen this year” I can definitely say that 15th Annual Maryland Film Festival of 2013 was the indeed the BEST EVER!

All links go to Facebook DRAMA SHORTS Several dramatic short films. More description at the link.(DRAMA) OPENING NIGHT SHORTS Several short films of varying genres. More description at the link. IT FELT LIKE LOVE Fourteen-year-old Lila is experiencing a boring Brooklyn summer when she decides to pursue a tough older boy at the expense that her desperation and posturing will carry her too far into unfamiliar territory and she may be forced to confront reality. (DRAMA)  16 ACRES The dramatic inside story of the monumental collision of interests at the Ground Zero in the decade after 9/11 (DOCUMENTARY) A TEACHER When a high school teacher in Texas has an affair with one of her students, her life begins to unravel as the relationship evolves. (DRAMA) 12 O'CLOCK BOYS Pug, a wisecracking 13 year, has one goal in mind: to join The Twelve O’clock Boys; the notorious urban dirt-bike gang of Baltimore. (DOCUMENTARY) VHS 2 Searching for a missing student, two private investigators break into his house and find collection of VHS tapes. Viewing the horrific contents of each  cassette, they realize there may be dark motives behind the student's  disappearance. (HORROR) ZERO CHARISMA A gamer geek feels threatened when a neo-nerd hipster joins his group of gamers and he feels like he will lose his identity as the Game Master. (COMEDY) _________________________________ As stated above here on the 'Nother Brother Entertainment blog you can read more about the... Click the graphic above to read it! See more of my photos from the 2013 Maryland Film Festival here

Related Links
You can see ALL of our posts about the Maryland Film Festival HERE

Cinematographer Bradford Young

Let me tell you about Mr. Young. I’ve been a fan of his for years and in a short amount of time I can see why he has gotten so much acclaim. This is what I said about one of his early works in March 2012.

That project was My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women in Hip Hop (2010) and this is what I said:
A special came on BET about female emcees in hip hop. My Mic Sounds Nice was clearly the BEST production I ever seen on BET. Period. I liked My Mic Sounds Nice so much because like dream hampton said “partly because the thing looked so good”.

I really didn’t know HE shot that until I looked up the resume of one of his frequent collaborators Ava DuVernay. It was soon though that I found out how talented he was.

Since then I have seen the majority of the feature films Mr. Young has shot and they all look FANTASTIC! Most of them I reviewed.

Those films were:
Restless City (2011)
Pariah (2011)
Middle of Nowhere (2012)
Mother of George (2013)

As you can tell I was well versed in Mr. Young’s work so when I read this in the Maryland Film Festival email I was beyond excited! (Click for bigger view)

I knew if I saw him at the festival I would jump at the chance to meet him. I was chilling in the Filmmaker’s Lounge before my next film that last day of the festival and I saw him chilling scrolling on his cell phone. You know I had to go meet the brother and get his autograph!

Bradford Young's autograph in the 2013 Maryland Film Festival Guide
on the page of the film he  worked on Mother  of George

We talked for about 2 minutes and he was a real cool cat. I didn’t want to disturb him so I gave a few parting words and left him alone. 

Bradford Young. Photo by Jason Putsche

As stated in the email above, later that day Mr. Young co-hosted its 2013 Closing Night screening of Mother of George (pictured above). After seeing the film, which was FANTASTIC, at the Closing Night Party I had to shake his hand again and tell him what great work he had done. (More about Mother of George linked below)

This is the thing. I don’t get excited about meeting “celebrities”. I see them at the festival all the time and sometimes at work. I never go out of my way to introduce myself or ask for pictures/autographs. I’m not that guy. 

There are on few occasions where I get hyped and being a black filmmaker of course it’s when I meet other black filmmakers like Mr. Young. It was a pleasure to meet him and I hope to see him again on the festival circuit. 

Left to Right: Dankwa Brooks and Bradford Young

Come on. You know I took a picture too ;-)

Read what I said about Mother of George here

ADDITIONAL
Bradford Young's Official Website
http://bradfordyoung.com/

Read the New York Times article about Mr. Young below.

He’s Just a ‘Custodian of the Moment’

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

By AMANDA PETRUSICH

May 16, 2012

New York Times

THERE’S a scene early on in “Middle of Nowhere,” one of this year’s Sundance prize-winning films, when a young married couple bicker briefly in the visiting area of a prison: the room is pallid, even clammy, but the actors’ faces are vibrant and vulnerable, held full-frame. It’s a triumphant, even signature moment for the film’s cinematographer, Bradford Young.

“I’m big on faces,” Mr. Young said, his own collapsing into a sweet, easy grin. “I like to fill the frame with heads. I use faces as landscapes, as architecture. That always feels like the right place to start.”

Mr. Young, 34, a New Yorker, is one of a cadre of emerging black filmmakers — including the “Middle of Nowhere” director, Ava DuVernay, and the filmmakers Dee Rees and Tina Mabry — making visually compelling cinema addressing the outliers at the edges of black culture in America. Working mostly outside the auspices of Hollywood, they’re finding new ways to circumvent traditional channels (like using Ms. DuVernay’s distribution company, Affrm, or African American Film Festival Releasing Movement, which will release “Middle of Nowhere” later this year in concert with Participant Media).

“The word that comes to mind when thinking of Bradford’s visual style is ‘lush,’ ” Ms. DuVernay said in an e-mail. “It is full. When I watch people of color in most films, the image is so often flat or partial. Nothing about what Bradford does is partial. Every frame is full-bodied and potent and robust. It’s so exciting because it’s so rare.”

As a storyteller, Mr. Young is preternaturally drawn to marginalization; in nearly all the movies he shoots, including “Restless City,” now getting a national rollout, an outsider contends with an unkind or indifferent world. That fundamental battle — to be acknowledged, to be loved — animates his work as well as his life. Mr. Young’s grandparents were a formative influence; he left Louisville, Ky., at 15 to live with his father in Chicago (“I was a kid from a small town in the mid-South who knew there was better, you know?”), but not before internalizing his grandparents’ high standards.

“There was an intense push for prestige, for intention, in everything we did,” he recalled over coffee in the East Village. “My grandparents were people of their time. They were fighting their own war in a country they wanted to be a part of and weren’t allowed to be a part of. Growing up, I didn’t have the privilege of forgetting that.”

The product of four generations of Kentucky funeral directors (his family’s funeral home opened in 1907, and is one of the oldest continually operating black-owned funeral parlors in the country), Mr. Young eschewed the family business to study film at Howard University, where he worked with the director Daniel Williams. Mr. Young referred to Mr. Williams’s short “A Thousand Days a Year” (2000), about the desire for spirituality in the midst of chaos, as a masterpiece.

“He’s so prolific and is a true independent filmmaker,” Mr. Young said. “I consider him to be the architect of my photographic sensibilities.”

Mr. Young’s creative choices are mindful without feeling deliberate. Each shot serves the narrative in a specific way: a bit of visual information might be purposefully withheld, a camera angle might suggest a slight shift in power.

His distinctive approach, which won him the excellence in cinematography award at Sundance in 2011 (for Ms. Rees’s “Pariah,” a coming-of-age story about a black lesbian in Brooklyn), is the product of learned restraint. He favors raw light and has a penchant for shooting into it, but said he ultimately focuses on getting out of the way.

“That’s how you get something way more authentic, way more cerebral, way more visceral,” he said. “Just be a custodian of the moment. Step back. Watch.”

In “Restless City,” also distributed by Affrm, Djibril (Sy Alassane), a 21-year-old Senegalese immigrant living in Harlem, grapples with self-identification and the odd, devastating loneliness of his new life in New York. For the film, which was directed by the Nigerian-born photographer Andrew Dosunmu, Mr. Young often positioned his camera behind grimy, scratched windows, providing a point of tension between the meticulously costumed characters and the imperfect world they inhabit.

“The spaces of the African immigrant world in New York, they exist through all these layers of plastic and plexiglass; you can walk up and down 115th Street and there are so many establishments where you have to go through curtains, you have to go through all these things to get in,” he explained. “I know that world by peeking through the window: an African-American peeking through the window at Africans of another sort of diaspora.”

Nevertheless, the tension he establishes can feel universal.

“I’m drawn to these films because those are worlds that I know a lot about,” he said. “I feel comfortable in those spaces because I consider myself a marginalized person. I feel like it’s my duty to be a part of those stories. It doesn’t have to be about something abject, it can be about something enlightened, but I want my work to be focused on that bit of metadata — that life is beautiful, but it’s a struggle.”

Mr. Young has gathered considerable accolades from the indie community (as well as beyond it), but he continues to tussle personally with the insularity of the scene. “How independent are we?” he asked. “It’s not just about being free from Hollywood, but are you freeing your mind? Are you freeing your story?”

He is still working on realizing that freedom. Although he’s completed eight features and he’s reading new scripts and working on his first solo art installation, which he said will combine sculptural and motion picture elements, he’s hesitant to define his aesthetic.

“I feel like I’m still in a great discovery process, trying to figure out what it is, ultimately, that I want to say with the camera,” he said. “I’m exploring. I’m looking forward to the day where I can communicate: ‘This is what the intention was. This is what I do.’ It’s been a really fulfilling couple years, but it’s only been a couple years.”