Christopher Rainey, aka "Quest" – his hip-hop name – lives with his wife Christine’a and their young daughter PJ in north Philadelphia.
Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.
The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a dreamlike visual style of great aesthetic beauty. The pace and editing of the film, which slides gently through different layers of narrative, including the voice-over of an unborn child, creates an elegiac mood, as well as evoking something of the less time-bound perspective of the traditional African mind. In this world, the souls of the ancestors are present, provide guidance and ground for the living.
This was the first widely released American film to have been directed by an African-American woman. Although she is renowned for her activism, Dash is never cliché-bound. The women in the film come across more strongly than the men: from the elder Nana (Cora Lee Day), rich in the wisdom of herbs and potions, and steeped in the spirit-based beliefs of Africa, through the passion and innocence of Eula (Alva Rogers), and on to the world-weariness of Yellow Mary (Barbara O Jones). The entire cast is totally convincing and bring to this almost magical realist tale a feeling of immediacy and veracity.
In the making of her most recent album Lemonade, Beyoncé spoke of being influenced by the film’s emphasis on the importance of African cultural roots – a tradition-focused slant much more sophisticated than the "back to Africa", Afro-hairstyle fashion of the late 1960s. The film addresses, obliquely but no less powerfully, the legacy of slavery and lynching, in the context of an extended family which wrestles, passionately and intelligently, with their spiritual heritage, a legacy of beliefs, ways of relationship and connection with the past, that provide them with great pride – not just in spite of the wounds they have suffered over centuries, but perhaps also in part thanks to them.
This BFI dual-format release of a newly restored print includes Dash's audio commentary to the film, a 72-minute interview with her from earlier this year, as well as one with cinematographer Jafa, and a Q&A with the director from the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival, moderated by playwright and actress Regina Taylor.
Such extras provide invaluable context to an extraordinary work. Dash’s film speaks of traditions that are as fundamentally American as any other, ties that connect African-Americans with their tragic history at the hands of white traders and slave-owners, as well as with their roots further back in a culture in which every form of life, from food and cooking to music and farming, expresses the life of the spirit. It has always partly been this intense spiritual quality in African-American life that has been most threatening to white culture and forms of Christianity intent on seeing the spirit as in some way superior to the senses and the sensual, and denying so vehemently the vitality of the human body and nature. It's true as well, as Beyoncé no doubt recognises, that much of the deep unease which runs through African-American culture today and that leads to violence and drug use, is in part caused by a general loss of connection to the ancestors that Daughters of the Dust so beautifully portrays.
Overleaf: watch the 2016 trailer for the restored Daughters of the Dust
Fellow defenders of the Delta tradition Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ have never recorded together before. Billed as a “historic collaboration”, this album features appearances from starry performers including Bonnie Raitt, and excellent young jazz singer Lizz Wright. After a couple of listens, however, fans will be dismayed at the misuse of the term “historic”. An opportunity was missed to do something original.
The strapline for this joyful show is: “One day; six cities; a thousand stories.” Allowing for hyperbole, this is just about right. Performance poet Inua Ellams’s new show is set in a handful of cities that stretch across one part of the globe, from London to Lagos, Accra, Kampala, Harare and Johannesburg.
Mulatu Astatke has carved out a particular niche within music. He is a one-off purveyor of what Brian Eno called “jazz from another planet”, smoky, mysterious and playful. He’s about the only artist you could describe as both transcendent and sleazy. The sleazy bit is mainly due to the colours of the horns and vibraphone, suggesting a less than salubrious nightclub, and he himself has something of the demeanour of a lounge lizard.
It’s hot. Real hot. And you’re dancing, just lost in music. You’re at the legendary Shrine nightclub in Lagos, where Afrobeat star Fela Kuti is king. It’s 1994. And it’s hot. Sweat is just pouring off you, no longer in little trickles but soaking through your clothes. And still you dance. As the beat pounds along, you can hear Fela intone: “Men are born; kings are made”, then something about “one nation, indivisible”, before he says, “War has never been the answer — long live Nigeria!
There comes a point in any experimental music festival when you have to accept the silliness and go with it. And at Borealis, that point comes very early.
There's no reason why ruffs and candles shouldn't mesh with bursts of contemporary speech, song and lighting, given a defter hand than director Ellen McDougall's. Shakespeare's timeless issues of racism and sexism have plenty of mileage in them, though in less skewed proportions than they find here. Many of this production's components are promising, but the whole is a strident mess.
Those of us who saw the first, 1977 TV adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots in our teens still remember the shock and horror at its handling of a subject about which we knew little, American slavery. We know a lot more now, but the visceral reaction to inhumanity and injustice is no less strong. That's thanks to the high production values of the latest version, its gift for finding the right actors, and the often giddying cinematography of an honourable mainstream parallel to a towering masterpiece among movies, 12 Years a Slave.
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.
It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to the front ranks of this year’s Academy Awards all the more impressive. And how skilfully Moonlight confounds definition by the categories into which it might easily be slotted – as a gay film, or a black film, however much both elements are crucial to its identity.
What’s more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust
To achieve something so universal, Jenkins has set his drama in a very particular location, the Liberty City district of Miami. It was where the director himself grew up, as did Tarell Alvin McCraney, the writer from whose original drama treatment In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue the film is adapted. The two did not know each other then: what they did share in youth, however, was the experience of growing up with mothers who had drug addiction issues.
It’s there that we first encounter the film’s hero, 10-year-old Chiron (Alex Hibbert, slight, silent), who’s known as “Little”, the word that gives the first of Moonlight’s three sections its title. The second, which carries the boy’s given name, catches him at 16, now played by Ashton Sanders, gangly and avoiding eye contact. The third, with Chiron a young adult, is titled “Black”, after the moniker he’s now given himself (also an affectionately bestowed nickname he had acquired in the middle episode).
It’s not only physical slightness that sets Chiron apart: he’s treated as an outsider by his more aggressive contemporaries for another reason, one which they sense but he himself has not yet registered. The film opens with the latest of what we guess is a series of rejections, but this one ends on a more positive note with Little befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali). Of Cuban descent, Juan may be a community hard man and drug dealer, but he shows only kindness to this resolutely silent youngster, first feeding him and then taking him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).
Her home becomes a place of refuge for the troubled Chiron as the circumstances of his home life with mother Paula (Naomie Harris, falling gradually and hauntingly into full crack addiction), as well as that of this “adopted” family change. The other anchor point of Chiron’s world is his friendship with his contemporary Kevin, shown from innocent childhood games through to more loaded adolescent encounters, a bond that will also presage damage as the film progresses.
“At some point you've got to decide who you wanna be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you,” Juan tells the boy at one point, his phrase catching the essence of what Moonlight is about: the shaping, the realisation of the eventual adult character. Juan’s words come shortly after one of the film’s tenderest moments, as he teaches the child to swim, though what’s actually more important is that Chiron is somehow learning to trust. The tragic irony that Ali’s character, the one who shows such concern for Chiron, is also dealing the substances that are bringing his mother down, prompts one of the most poignant moments of the first episode.
The defining moment of the succeeding section also takes place at the sea, as Chiron and Kevin talk on the beach (pictured above, Jharrel Jerome, left, with Ashton Sanders): Chiron once more risks trust, relaxing the barriers of self-protection that he has constructed around himself (“I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops”, he poignantly reveals). The cruelty is that hurt will again follow revelation, culminating in an act of self-assertion that will change the course of the young man’s life, sending him away from his home environment.
But distance is not the only change that comes with Moonlight’s final part. Trevante Rhodes (an erstwhile professional sportsman himself, physically powerful here, yet so damaged inside) plays the now adult Black, who’s bulked himself up protectively: he’s become a dealer, like his first mentor Juan, with a muscled body to match, teeth ribbed in gold. When Black makes an almost impromptu journey from his new home territory, Atlanta, back to Miami, his whole life comes up for reappraisal. (Pictured above: André Holland, left, with Trevante Rhodes.)
Jenkins’ choice of an elliptical narrative structure, one that registers change rather than spelling it out, is a stroke of genius. It also makes for the sheer freshness of impression that is so powerful in Moonlight, suitable not only for a story anchored in childhood, but also involving a hero who’s at times reticent almost to the point of speechlessness. It's as if the director defines his canvas through spots of colour that coalesce into an image, rather than through any direct stroke of the brush.
Moonlight’s visual sense is highly painterly, too, from the pastel tones of the Liberty City locations (James Laxton’s cinematography catches them with an easy beauty that surely belies their real character) through to the distinct colour orientations of the film’s three parts. There’s a sheer confidence in Nicholas Britell’s score too, melding what we might expect – rap, jukebox melodies – with the grand emotional assertions of Mozart. Comparisons already drawn with the likes of Terrence Malick are not incidental, such is Jenkins’s sheer flair: it's only his second feature, and to draw this quality of performance from his three male leads and supporting players alike is an almost impeccable achievement. Revelatory filmmaking.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Moonlight