Authenticity, Biography, and Race: A critique of the 2013 Film Festival Circuit

Roya Zahra Rastegar

As a festival curator and scholar, I constantly grapple with the tension of how to talk or write about films that have yet to—or may never—reach broader audiences. The intention of this article is twofold: first, to highlight films that have circulated through domestic film festivals in the first half of 2013 and are relevant to American studies scholars working on questions of race, sexuality, gender, and national identity; and second, to raise a concern with the conditions in which films about race gain visibility, and the limits these conditions pose for the recognition and future development of a more capacious independent film culture. Let me begin with a word about the significance of film festivals for independent film culture. The ability for independent films to gain broad visibility or “break out” to national audiences is subject to the curatorial selections of high-profile film festivals (in North America, this includes Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, South by Southwest, Tribeca, Seattle, San Francisco International, and the L.A. Film Festival, among others). Based on the decisions of individual festival programmers, filmmakers gain access to a festival platform and an audience of critics, sales agents, and distributors. Selected films also become part of a framework in which film professionals and press identify “trends” around popular culture and society as they manifest in films. Identifying a larger trend lends further value and relevance to a few key films—among thousands made each year—which are posited as reflective of not only current film culture, but also shifts in public opinion and thought. So it is interesting when the current proliferation of biographical documentaries about intellectual and political leaders working around questions of race, culture, and social justice is not called out as a “trend.” In the past year, these include Shola Lynch’s Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn, Stephen Vittoria’s Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, Frieda Mock’s Anita, Ava DuVernay’s Venus Vs., Pratibha Parmar’s Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, ’s Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You, Bill Siegal’s Trials of Mohammad Ali, and Marina Zenovich’s : Omit the Logic.1 Are these documentaries reflective of a cultural shift in how race is being engaged in society?2 Or do these films signal a popular recognition of the contributions of Black intellectual thought and cultural formations to our contemporary society? The curious disregard

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of thinking about these documentaries together precludes a sustained investigation and analysis necessary to address these questions. Further obscured are how these documentaries challenge conventions of biography and expectations of authenticity in order to create more expansive contexts for how the lives of people of color are read on-screen. Scholarship has addressed how the biopic (either in fiction or in documentary film) is valued foremost for its veracity and structured around a single life-changing event that defines the subject’s purpose/direction and provides the broader reason for the audience’s interest in his or her life.3 Three recent documentaries that deliberately unsettle this organizing structure stand out: The Stuart Hall Project, directed by John Akomfrah; American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, directed by Grace Lee; and Brothers Hypnotic, directed by Reuben Atlas. The Stuart Hall Project builds a visceral texture to Hall’s personal formations of selfhood, which are paralleled with articulations of theories of hybridity, representation, and cultural identity, by overlaying songs from Miles Davis’s oeuvre. The documentary is produced by Lina Gopal and David Lawson, who have worked alongside Akomfrah as members of the Black Audio Film Collective.4 Gopal and Lawson also worked with Akomfrah on his 2011 acclaimed experimental archival film about migration, The Nine Muses, which draws from archival footage to masterfully elude a fixed sense of the past or autobiographical truth. The filmmakers of American Revolutionary were faced with the challenge of how to make a biopic about a subject—ninety-seven-year-old, Chinese American, Detroit-based Grace Lee Boggs—who is resistant to explicating her own personal transformations on- or offscreen. The director Grace Lee chooses to shape the emotional core of the film around Boggs’s investment in difficult conversations, Marxist theories, and enduring grassroots organizing practices as revolutionary forces for social change. The documentary’s structure emulates dialectical theories as a foundation for exploring Boggs’s shifting strategies as an activist and philosopher throughout her participation in civil movements around labor, Black Power, and environmental justice. Following in a similar vein is Brothers Hypnotic, directed by the first-time filmmaker Reuben Atlas and produced by the documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard (director of Slavery by Another Name [2012]; editor of Chisholm ’72—Unbought & Unbossed [2004]; executive producer of Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin [2003]). Brothers Hypnotic begins as a documentary about the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, composed of eight brothers raised on Chicago’s South Side by their two mothers and father, the jazz legend Phil Cohran. The band has practiced together since the youngest brother was three years old, and the band’s sound has

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attracted the attention of Mos Def and earned the brothers a shared stage with Prince. That their lower profile is remarkably incommensurate with their talent, sound, and past performance history becomes the ground on which the film quickly shifts from a biographical portrait of a band to a collective portrait of artistic practice as developed out of a radicalized political education under the tutelage of their parents. Cohran was a formative cultural leader in the Black Arts Movement. He played with Sun Ra Arkestra, mentored Earth, Wind & Fire, and founded the Afro-Arts Theater, which was closed down by the city after Stokely Carmichael’s visit at the peak of the Black Panthers’ visibility. The brothers were explicitly taught about the co-optation and exploitation of African American artists by the music industry. The apex of the film comes when the band is offered a record deal with Atlantic Records, and the brothers must collectively decide how to reconcile the contemporary conditions within which musicians sustain themselves and the principles on which they were raised. In this way, the documentary decenters a linear narrative around each of the young men in the band or their father’s legacy—and ultimately foregrounds the conditions and contexts in which radical ideals can cross generations. These emotive approaches in Stuart Hall, American Revolutionary, and Brothers Hypnotic build interest and connection to the subjects of the biography not by honing in on key events that happened to them in their lives but by immersing the viewer in the contexts around which Hall, Boggs, and the members of Hypnotic Brass Ensemble grow their ideas, and, consequently, compel the viewer toward a different relationship to radical thought and practice. This is distinct, for example, from Lynch’s Free Angela, which focuses explicitly on Angela Davis’s 1971 trial, instead of considering her political and philosophical training from an early age, and her contributions to theories of Marxism, cultural studies, women of color feminism, critical race theory, and the prison abolition movement; or Osder’s Let the Fire Burn, which draws on archival news footage and legal hearings to depict John Africa and MOVE, a Philadelphia-based Black liberation movement, through the televised spectacle of state violence that bombed their homes in May 1985 (distinct to the more personal portrait of a larger community drawn through Toni Cade Bambara’s narration of Louis Messiah’s documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue [1986]).5 Other documentaries from this year refract the focal point of the documentary away from the individual subject to foreground a complex dynamic between subject and filmmaker. The filmmakers of American Promise, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, chronicle the divergent educational paths of their son, Idris, and his best friend, Seun, over thirteen years. After sharing

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classrooms during their primary education, the boys go their separate ways when Idris is enrolled in the Dalton School, a private high school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, while Seun attends Banneker Academy, a public school in Brooklyn known for its rigorous educational programs geared toward a primarily student of color body. By setting up the ongoing interaction between the boys as they move through these different educational environments, the documentary is able to trace how each boy’s learning process, self-perceptions, and sense of cultural and racial identities develop as they come of age.6 As the parents of one of the documentary’s two subjects, Brewster and Stephenson cannot be impartial to the film’s outcome—they have a stake in their son’s educational development, and their delay in recognizing impediments to his learning that were not a planned part of the film (like his diagnosed ADHD) are reflections of their own investments in the metrics of a conservative, standardized educational framework. The filmmakers make a political, social, and economic issue of educational resources emotionally resonant and palpable through their own son’s continued interaction with—and eventual alienation from—Seun. In Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, art star Mickalene Thomas—known for her bright enamels and rhinestone embellishments of large painted and collaged portraits of Black women—interviews her mother, Sandra Bush. Thomas uses the documentary form to have an emotionally candid conversation with Mama Bush structured through an intensely personal series of questions about the latter’s tumultuous marriage, drug addiction, and cancer. While the film’s initial draw is its director, the audience’s attention is wholly directed toward the subject, even as Thomas’s questioning voice off camera constantly reminds us of the intimate mother– daughter context in which the interview is being conducted. As Mama Bush recounts the conditions under which her fashion model career was cut short (after being replaced by Iman, who was considered more authentically exotic),7 the inspiration for Thomas’s portraits to create elaborate and dreamlike portraits of Black women, starting with immortalizing her mother on canvas and film, becomes clear. In this way, the documentary creates a reflection of a daughter through her mother, a portrait of a renowned artist through her muse. A different instance of this kind of refracted biographical portrait can be seen in Kevin Jerome Emerson’s Island of Saint Matthews.8 Set in the town of Westport, Mississippi, the film blends scripted and documentary elements as Emerson interviews his aunt about the 1973 Tombigbee River flood that destroyed homes and with them, family photo albums. Long, meditative scenes of a dam control center, baptisms, waterskiing, and interviews with distinctive characters in the area lend insight into Emerson’s intimate connections to the people and way of life in Westport. Island of St. Matthews

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becomes a kind of moving image picture album that manifests Emerson’s own cultural and personal remembrance. Given these pointed shifts in biographical documentaries, it is interesting how expectations of authenticity and veracity are exposing themselves in the realm of fiction films. There has been a notable increase in fiction films by directors of color, many of which create complex narratives structures and subvert the conventions of cinematic genres. Among these are Andrew Dosumnu’s lushly lensed drama Mother of George, Henry Barrial’s ensemble chamber drama The House That Jack Built, Kevin Willmott’s historical futurist sci-fi Destination Planet Negro, Shaka King’s unraveling stoner romantic comedy Newly Weeds. Cherien Dabis’s wedding film turned diasporic family drama May in the Summer, and Meera Menon’s coming- of-age road movie Farah Goes Bang.9 But even as networks of filmmakers of color grow inside and outside the festival circuit, how legible are the value of films by and about people of color that do not rely on biographical authenticity to the film industry? Consider one of the most successful independent fiction films so far this year, Fruitvale Station, based on the true events surrounding the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009. First-time writer–director Ryan Coogler offers a portrait of a day in the life of Grant before he was shot on a train platform by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers on New Year’s Day in Oakland. With clarity and cinematic restraint, Coogler’s film offers what the cell phone footage swarming the Internet in the days following could not capture: the immensity of the loss of a young father who was in the midst of his life. But despite this offering of an emotional portrait on a humanizing mission, both criticism and praise for the film thus far reveals expectations of the film to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, of Grant’s last day. At the heart of almost every review or evaluation of the film is the nagging question: how authentic is the portrayal? Did Grant really go out of his way to help out the white girl at the grocery store? How do we know he tried to save a dog from bleeding to death in the middle of the road if he was alone at the time? The former could be corroborated, but the latter scene has kicked up dirt around the question of how far creative license extends in a story based on true events, particularly a biopic. The critique is that the scene was simply a manipulative narrative device for “heart-tugging, head-shaking and rabble-rousing.”10 Fruitvale Station, which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance, and the Prize of the Future at the , circulates not only with the expectation of authenticity to the events surrounding Grant’s death but also the relationship between the film’s subject and its director. Coogler is frequently noted for his parallel identity position to

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Grant—both early-twenties African American men living in Oakland. The Weinstein Company moved the film’s original release date so that it would hit theaters the day before the verdict was delivered on the trial of George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin.11 What are the conditions under which films by and about people of color are being valued and deemed to have “crossover” potential by industry professionals? Fruitvale Station is expected be nominated for a healthy share of Oscars—in line with last year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which plainly advertised its cast of nonactors and foregrounded the story’s naturalistic realism. This would be the third “breakout” film about people of color in the past five years to have world premiered at Sundance. The buzz around Lee Daniels’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire was also accompanied by the film’s biographical resonance with the director; the distributors, Tyler Perry and Oprah; and the actress, Monique. The novel itself has been mistaken as an autobiography since its publication in 1996. Yet the discussions about creative license, biographical connection to the material, and authenticity of the representation played out very differently for Coogler and Daniels than for Ben Zeitlin, the white-Jewish director of Beasts. The focus of the publicity around Beasts placed the burden of authenticity on the film’s cast, rather than on the director’s relationship to the material, even though the film was adapted from a play by the writer Lucy Alibar, closely based on personal details of her childhood in rural Florida and her father’s illness.12 The terms on which films by/about people of color gain recognition, resources, and attention from the larger film industry machine are being circumscribed around a very old demand for people of color to speak some presumed truth about themselves and their communities. The development of a nuanced and capacious film culture is curtailed when the extent of a film’s veracity overrides critical engagement with a keenly observed story or a subversive twist of genre. Consider the reception of recent independent films by Chicana/o directors. This year, 2013, has been one of the most significant years for fiction films by Chicano directors in the past decade. But despite the films being finished or close to completion, few have been getting play on the broader festival circuit. Examples include Richard Montoya’s directorial debut Water and Power, an adaptation of the Culture Clash legend’s 2006 play about twin brothers, one a high- ranking government official, the other a police officer, who are forced to navigate L.A.’s corrupt political underground. Cry Now is Alberto Barboza’s deeply romantic Chicano rockabilly ode to artistic practice set in Boyle Heights and Echo Park. Diego Joaquin Lopez and Mateo Frazier’s drug bust, New Mexico–set thriller Blaze You Out follows a punk DJ who enters the heroin trade

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underworld to save her younger sister (with the help of some serious brujería). R. F. Rodriguez’s Pardon is about a cholo ex-con desperate to be reunited with his daughter.13 This, however, does not mean films about Mexican Americans have been absent from festivals. For example, My Sister’s Quinceanera premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of Closing Doors premiered in competition at Tribeca, and played at Sundance’s inaugural NEXT Festival this summer.14 Both of these films, by white directors, share a naturalistic look and less-scripted structure (more clearly identified as “independent”), while films by Chicano directors, whose aesthetic and narrative structures are visibly influenced by a historical legacy of Chicano theater and play with genre-based storytelling, have been largely ignored. The curatorial selections of bigger festivals to select films like My Sister’s Quinceanera and Stand Clear over so many available Chicano films risks curtailing the possibilities of distribution for an entire crop of emerging independent filmmakers. This danger becomes even more urgent as Latino and Chicano film festivals struggle to remain solvent.15 What spaces will be left for films like these to be exhibited, watched, written about, bought, distributed, analyzed and studied? How will these cultural expressions find a place in the archives? The valuation process for festivals is calibrated on the legibility of a film’s narrative structure and aesthetic sensibility, which, for filmmakers of color, is dependent on an articulable relationship of the filmmaker to the material and, by extension, the film’s presumed veracity. While there are an increasing number of films that engage race, the conditions in which filmmakers of color can experiment with story, genre, and cinematic conventions will continue to be limited as long as film festivals—ruled by the preconceptions and tastes of programmers, critics, and distributors—are the primary gates independent films must pass through to reach audiences.

Notes 1. Long Distance Revolutionary foregrounds Abu-Jamal’s ongoing radical intellectual work, teachings, and activist contributions as a radio journalist from inside the prison system over the past thirty-two years rather than the events surrounding or the legitimacy of his political imprisonment. This film had a particularly limited release. After premiering in Copenhagen at CPH:DOX, the film has had difficulty circulating in the United States, bypassing almost all the film festivals, and with a screening at Newark’s Cityplex-12 that was mysteriously canceled at the last minute (www.workers.org/2013/04/25/behind-newark-cancellation-of-mumia-long-distance-revolutionary/). Anita recontextualizes the sensationalized trials and unforgiving media criticism to consider the longer-term impact of Anita Hill’s testimony to help ensure the rights of future generations of women in the workplace. DuVernay said she

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specifically chose not to interview Serena Williams, in order to carve a distinct identity for Venus Williams as she agitates for fair pay for female tennis players and male tennis players at Wimbledon. Venus Vs. world premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and aired a few weeks later on ESPN in July 2013, as the kickoff to their Title IX series. DuVernay made the documentary specifically for ESPN, after being approached to make a documentary about a female athlete of her choice. As for future releases, Richard Ray Perez’s Cesar’s Last Fast is about Cesar Chavez’s 1988 “Fast for Life” in alliance with his commitments to farmer workers’ rights. 2. Three other notable documentaries that engage the social, cultural, and political intersections of gender, sexuality, and death include Marta Cunningham’s Valentine Road, Yoruba Richen’s The New Black, and Christine Turner’s Homegoings, respectively. Valentine Road, which premiered at Sundance in January 2013, is about the Oxnard middle school shooting of biracial fifteen-year-old Larry King in 2008 by a classmate, Brandon McInerney. Rather than simply indict McInerney, who received a twenty-one-year prison sentence, Cunningham carefully illuminates the homophobic, violent, and white supremacist forces that entangle both boys’ lives in parallel struggles. The New Black, which world premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June 2013, examines the presumption of homophobia within the African American community as it manifested after the passage of legislation preventing same-sex marriage the day Obama was first elected to office. The documentary follows leaders who are at once challenging homophobia and confronting racism within gay organizations. Interviews and archival footage complicate the intersections between the African American and the LGBT civil rights movements. With the support of the film scholar–producer Yvonne Welbon, Richen’s investigation of the notion that homophobia is a pillar in the Black church (and the motivations of the Christian Right in propagating this premise) are interwoven with a consideration of how legacies of structural violence have informed histories of marriage and family in the United States. Homegoings, which premiered at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight in February 2013, uses intimate interviews, archival photographs, and cinéma vérité to create a portrait of the undertaker Isaiah Owens, who moved to Harlem to train as a mortician in 1968 and has since drawn from historical and cultural traditions from the Black community to organize funerals. 3. See John Corner, “Biography within the Documentary Frame,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 43.1 (2002): 95–101; and Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36.3 (1983): 17–30. 4. The Black Audio Film Collective was founded in 1982 by seven students at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1982 and became an important aesthetic and discursive force in Britain before it formerly dissolved in 1998 (www.frieze.com/issue/article/this_day_remains/). 5. The Bombing of Osage Avenue was produced through the Scribe Video Center and is available in full on youtube.com. 6. Awarded a Special Jury Award for Achievement in US Documentary Filmmaking at Sundance, the documentary also screened at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2013. Brewster and Stephenson have developed a workbook, Promises Kept: How to Help Black Boys Succeed in School and in Life, of parenting and educational strategies “for people who love, raise, and educate Black boys.” 7. In 1975 the photographer Peter Bear claimed at a press conference that “he had ‘discovered’ [Iman] in the African jungle; they pretended she did not speak English. In reality, she was the well-educated daughter of a Somalian diplomat, and fluent in five languages” (www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Iman [accessed September 10, 2013]).

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8. Emerson is one of the most prolific experimental filmmakers working in the art and film worlds today. His documentary Quality Control, on the daily work of Mississippi dry cleaners, was part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. 9. Mother of George is about a newlywed Nigerian couple in New York whose relationship grows tense when they are not able to conceive a child together. Dosumnu—formerly creative director and photographer for Yves Saint Laurent—tells stories through a rich and complicated visual landscape of textures and colors that define not only the film’s aesthetic but manifest the emotional states of his characters. This approach to cinematic storytelling has been honed further after his 2009 Restless City and ongoing collaboration with the cinematographer Bradford Young (Pariah, Ain’t These Bodies Saints), who won a second cinematography award at Sundance this year, and the costume designer Mobolaji Dawodu. The Black Puerto Rican writer Joseph Vasquez’s script The House That Jack Built was brought to life by the Cuban director Henry Barrial more than fifteen years after it was written. Vasquez tragically passed away shortly after Hangin’ with the Homeboys became a cult favorite after its Sundance premiere in 1991. The House That Jack Built stars a Caribbean ensemble cast in a crisply written drama about an idealistic Boricua drug dealer whose ideals around family get pushed to a fatal limit when he sets his extended family up in a single Bronx apartment complex. Destination Planet Negro imagines a future way of life created by the fateful decisions of historical figures of the “talented tenth” to inhabit another planet as a way to solve the race problem of the twentieth century. Willmott’s playful approach to exploring history parallels his 2004 faux-documentary Confederate States of America, in which real and constructed archival photographs renarrate American history as if the Southern states had won the Civil War. 10. Geoff Berkshire, “Review: ‘Fruitvale,’” Variety, January 20, 2013. 11. The Weinstein Company set the original release date for Fruitvale Station for July 26, 2013. 12. Alibar writes that the play, Juicy and Delicious, was “about a frail, cowardly kid in the hot red clay of South Georgia named Hushpuppy—a boy, since I was too close to the story to make him a girl—and Hushpuppy’s daddy, who was a lot like my daddy; and Hushpuppy’s teacher, Miss Bathsheba, who was a lot like many of the ferocious, courageous Southern women who have been my teachers” (“Once There Was a Hushpuppy: On the Origins of Beasts of the Southern Wild” Zoetrope: All-Story 16.3 [2012]). 13. See “Ojos! 5 Hot American Latino films to discover in 2013” by the festival programmer and film journalist Christine Davila (http://chicanafromchicago.com/2013/01/07/ojos-5-hot-american-latino-films-to-discover-in- 2013/). 14. My Sister’s Quinceanera is directed by the Iowa-born, Dutch-trained director Aaron Douglas Johnston. The film is a loosely plotted fiction about a Mexican American family in a small town in Iowa, but despite a cute cast of nonactors, the distant fly-on-the wall observational approach set to Spanish guitar strumming reveals ethnographic intentions. While Stand Clear also employs an observational approach, the camera aligns the audience’s point of view to reflect the young Mexican American protagonist’s disorientation as he grapples with mild autism and wonder in the New York subway on the eve of Hurricane Sandy. 15. Davila’s pointed criticism of the ’s 2013 lineup for the lack of Latino/a films can be applied to other events of a similar caliber (http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine/latinobuzz-wtf-is-latino-at- tribeca).

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