Monday, June 10, 2013

The Best Film I Saw At The 2013 Maryland Film Festival

This will come as NO surprise to people who follow me or 'Nother Brother Entertainment on social networks, but my favorite film of the 2013 Maryland Film Festival was—Mother of George

My review was even published at indiewire blog Shadow & Act





Mother of George was the 2013 Closing Night Film of the Maryland Film Festival and that was perfect because out of the twelve feature films I saw it was BEST. I said more in my review (linked at the bottom) about how much I liked the film, but for the readers of this blog I included this epilogue.

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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Well that’s it, the best film I saw at the 2013 Maryland Film Festival. I have posted more reviews and of the many films I saw, including some of my photos from the festival this year EXCLUSIVELY on the ‘Nother Brother Entertainment Facebook Page in the photo album 2013 Maryland Film Festival

 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 

Live tweets from the DVD commentary with Director Andrew Dosunmu, Editor Oriana Soddu and Costume Designer Mobolaji Dawodu.

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