BlackmanVision Film Production When the lioness can tell her story, the hunter no longer controls the tale
Black Film Culture
Must see at the BFI London Film Festival
BlackmanVision’s choice for the BFI London Film Festival so far….
Interview with Smoking Dogs Films producers of Oil Spill – The Exxon Valdez Disaster
Smoking Dogs Films is located in Hackney London. It is made up of John Akomfrah OBE, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson who were members of the highly acclaimed and award-winning Black Audio Film Collective whose titles included Handsworth Songs and Seven Songs for Malcolm X. Their most recent documentary, Oil Spill – The Exxon Valdez [...]
Interview with NO! director Aishah Shahidah Simmons of AfroLez Productions
Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning African-American feminist lesbian independent documentary filmmaker, television and radio producer, published writer, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. In 1992, she founded AfroLez® Productions, an AfroLez®femcentric multimedia arts company committed to using the moving image, the written and spoken word to address those issues which have a [...]
Notorious the movie and Ms Wallace
Notorious is a film about the life and death of Notorious BIG aka Biggie Smalls born Christopher Wallace, legendary East Coast rapper and protege of Sean Combs aka Puff Daddy/P Diddy. When Biggie Small’s mother Violetta Wallace came to the USA from Jamaica, like all immigrants from the Caribbean she was chasing the American Dream. [...]
Precious – Gabourey Sidibe audition tape
Precious formerly titled Push is directed by Lee Daniels is based on a novel by Sapphire of the same name. It is worth noting that the word “Sapphire” is one of the stereotypes of Black women in which she is portrayed as strident, aggressive and hostile. This is very often the image of the dark-skinned [...]
First African American owned film studio
Tyler Perry is the first African American to own a studio and has a long history of making movies. He recently directed The Family that Preys, his sixth film, which has a stellar cast including Kathy Bates, Alfre Woodard and Robin Givens! ( remember her?). The story deals with and upper class and working class [...]
Black Candle – The Origins of Kwanzaa
M.K. Asante, Jr. has made a new film charting the origins of Kwanzaa, co-written by Maya Angelou. The film uses the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith as a framework. Interviewees include Chuck D and Amiri Baraka. MK Asante was one of the interviewees in [...]
Melvin van Peebles honoured
Melvin van Peebles who is an artist, writer and composer has been honoured by the African-American Film Critics Association with its Special Achievement Award. He made Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song 1971 an example of guerilla filmmaking long before the term was invented. He recounts having to pretend he was making a pornographic film to get [...]
Haile Gerima – film as weapon
I learned about Haile Gerima through articles that had been written about him and was delighted to find this inspirational interview with him on YouTube. In this amazing interview he talks about the making of Sankofa and Bush Mama. We also see the arts centre called Sankofa that he set up to promote Black filmmaking. [...]