Tribeca All Access Call For Submissions

Tribeca All Access (TAA) is a year round networking and career development program of the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) that supports the work of filmmakers from traditionally under-represented communities within the industry by providing access to industry representatives looking for new projects in development. Approximately 20 qualified directors and screenwriters will be selected to participate in one-on-one meetings with key industry players in addition to networking and learning from dedicated panels and comprehensive workshops during the Tribeca Film Festival. Program alumni receive year-round support through TAA OnTrack, which includes educational panels and workshops; TFI hosted presentation screenings; promotional support for completed films; and the use of digital filmmaking and editing equipment.

Tribeca All Access is open to both mid-career and emerging narrative and documentary filmmakers. Applicants are required to apply with a completed feature-length screenplay, documentary proposal, or documentary work-in-progress and must have at least one screenwriter or director attached who qualifies. Projects may be of any subject matter, genre, or budget range suited for independent or major studio production.

The program is now a recognized talent pool within the industry and an unrivaled opportunity to advance your filmmaking career.

Apply Now! Deadline is Monday, December 14, 2009.

Visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org/taa/ for complete details and upcoming events.

January 25, 2009

Film

Examining Race and a Future Beyond It

By DENNIS LIM for the New York Times.

“MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY,” an independent feature by the first-time writer-director Barry Jenkins, opens the morning after a one-night stand. Micah and Jo, who don’t yet know each other’s names, are young and black, and for want of a more descriptive term you might call them hipsters. In San Francisco, where the African-American population is less than 7 percent and where “black indie kids” (to use Mr. Jenkins’s term) are scarce, that gives their hookup added significance — at least for Micah. As he puts it to Jo, “You ever realize just how few of us there really are?”

For Mr. Jenkins, who is African-American, the question resounds within the context not just of Bay Area indie culture but also of American indie filmmaking, which is not exactly a bastion of diversity.

Like so many movies about 20-something urbanites, “Medicine for Melancholy,” which had its premiere at South by Southwest last year and opens in New York on Friday, concerns the search for self-definition. But it stands apart for its forthright attention to the push-pull of inclusion and exclusion that comes with being a minority member of a subculture.

Mr. Jenkins, 29, drew on his own experience as a recent transplant to San Francisco. Born and raised in Miami, he studied filmmaking at Florida State University, then worked at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions in Los Angeles. But he grew disillusioned with the industry, and he quit his job to travel the country. He met a woman from San Francisco and moved there to be with her. The end of that relationship, and the period of introspection that followed, led him to make “Medicine for Melancholy” (which is up for three Spirit Awards this year, including best first feature).

“As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other,” Mr. Jenkins said over breakfast in Brooklyn recently. Because he was in an interracial romance when he got there, he added, “I was almost buffered.”

“When that relationship was off,” he said, “it was like I was seeing the city for the first time.”

“Medicine for Melancholy” follows Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins) for a 24-hour period as they feel out each other’s quirks and hang-ups. Mr. Jenkins credits “Friday Night,” the 2002 French film about a brief encounter by one of his favorite directors, Claire Denis, as an inspiration. As a literal date movie, trained on an attractive couple playing out a talky mating ritual as they wander a photogenic city, “Medicine” also recalls Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.”

The characters keep circling back to questions of race and assimilation, but the film is less an identity-politics polemic than a credible portrait of a young man wrestling with those issues — a situation Mr. Jenkins found himself in not long ago.

He acknowledged that it was odd to experience a racial epiphany in, of all places, liberal San Francisco. But this is also a city where the African-American population is proportionally less than half of what it was in 1970 (the most visible emblem of the black exodus being the razing and redevelopment of the Fillmore district).

Mr. Jenkins’s ambivalence about San Francisco comes across in his film’s visual pallet . The digital-video images, so desaturated they border on monochromatic, have a romantic softness, and San Francisco looks even lovelier than it tends to in more expensive movies. But Mr. Jenkins also liked the idea of “reflecting the theme of a city with the color taken out.”

In making a film so attuned to its physical and psychic environment, Mr. Jenkins joins the ranks of regionalist indie directors whose movies are anchored in a powerful sense of place. “Medicine for Melancholy” does for San Francisco what Kelly Reichardt has done for the rural Pacific Northwest (in “Old Joy”), Lance Hammer for the Mississippi Delta (“Ballast”), Robinson Devor for the Seattle area (“Police Beat”) and Ramin Bahrani for the unseen pockets of New York City (“Chop Shop”).

“It’s absolutely rooted in its milieu, but it’s by no means a parochial film,” said Graham Leggat, the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society. Referring to Mr. Jenkins’s somewhat critical portrait of the city, he said: “It’s not a problematic film for San Francisco. It’s a film made in the spirit of how the city would like to think of itself, as a progressive place where people are fairly oppositional.”

Mr. Leggat noted that while the Bay Area has long been home to a robust enclave of documentary and experimental filmmakers, “there’s not really a vigorous narrative-filmmaking middle class.” The film society has expanded its activities to include production assistance and is committing funds to spur the growth of local filmmaking. But for now, Mr. Leggat said, “there’s not a critical mass of folks who can make a livelihood just working in the business.”

Mr. Jenkins can attest to that. He saves on rent by living with the parents of his cinematographer, James Laxton, an old friend. Through the production of the film he worked as a shipment supervisor at Banana Republic. He made “Medicine” with a bare-bones crew, on a budget that is, even by D.I.Y. standards, small change. (His official answer when people press him for numbers: “Probably less than the cost of your car.”)

Mr. Jenkins wrote the film nearly two years ago — “before Obamania took off,” he said — and race has since moved to the forefront of the national conversation. But instead of toying with vague notions of a “postracial” America, “Medicine” wonders what it would mean to look beyond race, when race still looms large in matters of cultural identity and social justice.

“Micah comes across as pro-black, and Jo’s is more of a post-race point of view,” Mr. Jenkins said. “When I started the film I was teetering between these two viewpoints. It’s like I was splitting my personality in two.”

Making the movie has helped clarify his thinking. “For me the film ended up being even more about class than race,” he said. “Micah talks about the city pushing black people out, but it’s really about pushing poor people out.” With a wry smile, he added: “I used to be obsessed with race. I’m more obsessed with class now.”

MAN IN POLYESTER SUIT
written & directed by Ed DuRante

BLACK DYNAMITE

New film sends up '70s `blaxploitation' classics

January 22, 2009

by Peter Howell

PARK CITY, Utah–Can you dig it?

On the day when the U.S. made history by inaugurating its first African-American president, it was a surreal experience at the Sundance Film Festival to watch Black Dynamite, a movie that gleefully rocks every black stereotype imaginable.

That's the whole point of it. Black Dynamite, which sold for $2 million (U.S.) to Sony Pictures following its huge reception here and which is due in theatres this summer, is in its own perverse way every bit as empowering as Barack Obama's rise to glory. A sequel is already planned.

Directed by Scott Sanders, it lovingly riffs on the "blaxploitation" movie genre of the 1970s; low-budget actioners where black anti-heroes with names like John Shaft and Foxy Brown busted crime in the ghetto, all while flipping the bird to "whitey" and "The Man."

It's more than just a straight send-up. No one winks at the camera, except in one scene when a boom mike strays into the picture.

Black Dynamite is a celebration of how much fun blaxploitation movies were, just as Austin Powers makes light of James Bond. You have to feel good about yourself if you're willing to mock yourself.

It opens with a fake ad for malt liquor called Anaconda ("When you pop the top, the panties drop") and goes on to bust every pimp-strolling move you've ever seen.

The title figure actually goes by the name Black Dynamite, played with fearsome authority and expert comic timing by Michael Jai White, who is also the co-screenwriter with Sanders and Byron Minns.

Black Dynamite, former CIA agent, is a complicated man no one understands – except every woman he casts his soulful eyes upon.

BD carries a gun longer than Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and that's not all he's packing. He can make sweet love to three women at once and do martial arts moves that impress even Fiendish Dr. Wu (Roger Yuan), one of many villains he crosses.

He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake, but that's life, brotha: "Sometimes to do the right thing, you've got to do the ugly thing."

BD is on the trail of the suckas who killed his younger brother. He also uncovers a plot to shrink the genitals of black men, to make them feel subservient to the white man once again. But that's never gonna happen in the era of Obama and Black Dynamite, is it? Damn right.

January 11, 2009

New York Times

Black Directors Look Beyond Their Niche

By GENE SEYMOUR

IT’S been 10 years since Spike Lee, entrepreneur, provocateur and role model for aspiring directors of color, declared in The New York Times that it was an era of unprecedented possibility for African-American filmmakers. At the tail end of the 1990s there was plenty of evidence backing Mr. Lee’s optimism.

Beginning in 1991, a year that had impressive debuts from disparate black directors like John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), Carl Franklin (“One False Move”) and Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), it seemed as though each successive year yielded promising starts from African-American talents: Albert and Allen Hughes ( “Menace 2 Society,” 1993), Darnell Martin (“I Like it Like That,” 1994), F. Gary Gray (“Friday,” 1995), Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou,” 1997) and Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man,” 1999).Varying degrees of critical acclaim and, most important, financial success came in the wake of these films, solidifying Hollywood’s consciousness of a lucrative African-American audience for films while promising a sweeping, solid and diversified presence of African-American talent in cinema for years to come.

But at the close of yet another decade, the promise still awaits fulfillment. Though some of the aforementioned directors have met or exceeded most of the critical expectations shown in their debuts, they have had mixed-to-sporadic success in getting their subsequent projects into theaters.

“All those people have done stunning, brilliant work,” said Warrington Hudlin, a producer (“House Party”) and co-founder of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. “But the appetite for and expectations of what sells for black filmmakers remains very narrow. It’s always been about what sells, which is as true for mainstream movies as it is for African-American movies.”

You could now literally count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Mr. Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story “Miracle at St. Anna” was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, “Madea Goes to Jail,” is set for release on Feb. 20.

Momentum for African-American cinema, it would seem, has been curtailed or at least stalled in part by studio executives’ preconceptions that black films are “niche product” with limited appeal. Yet at the same time black directors and producers still express optimism that they not only can continue to cultivate their black audiences but also can reach out further and wider to the mainstream, especially when contemplating Will Smith’s all-but-unchallenged supremacy as a box-office draw throughout the world as well as the impact of Barack Obama’s impending presidency.

Ms. Martin’s career trajectory in some ways reflects the erratic fortunes of the African-American filmmaker. Her smart, sexy romantic comedy, “I Like It Like That” won the 1994 New York Film Critics Circle award for best first film. And “Cadillac Records,” her musical history of Chess Records, the rhythm-and-blues label, was released last month to respectable reviews and box-office returns. But the intervening years were dominated by television work and one very frustrating film experience, “Prison Song,” which never went past the audience-testing stage in 2001.

Ms. Martin places much of the blame for her sporadic career in the feature-film business on the conflicts she had over the promotion of “I Like It Like That.” “They insisted on making me the poster child for the film, the ‘female Spike Lee,’ and I said, ‘Look, I don’t mind that. I’m proud to be a black woman director, and I want that out there.’ But we’d gotten some great reviews, and I felt that was what they should be leading with. If it had been a white director, they would have emphasized the reviews, but instead they were trying to get people to see it only because I was black.

“So I fought pretty hard over that. Actually it was more like a head-on collision. And I was told, ‘If you continue like this, you will never work again.’ And I thought, ‘That’s O.K., I paid off my student loans, what’re they going to take away from me?’ So I was getting known for being someone you couldn’t control.”

She also held on to a stubborn selectivity. “I was offered a lot of things that were about women of color, but I didn’t know yet how to make those things good. It was easier for me, at the time, to make things like, say, the pilot for ‘Oz,’ where the harder things were those that seemed like a more obvious fit, like ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ ” she said, referring to her 2005 made-for-TV adaptation of the Zora Neale Hurston novel. “Loved the book, but it had been a challenge for me to make this inner story work.”

The one movie she was involved in during the 14-year break — “Prison Song,” a “hip-hop opera” with the rapper Q-Tip in 2001 — ended badly too, once again, in her view, a victim of pigeonholing.

Its fate was sealed, Ms. Martin recalls, when it was tested for audiences at the Magic Johnson Theaters in Los Angeles, which draws predominantly black audiences. “I told the studio, ‘If you test it there, it will go no further because it is an art film.’ Sure enough, the audiences didn’t get it; the movie never made it to wider distribution.”

The years of exile from the feature-film world, however, have had their benefits. The television work, Ms. Martin said, sharpened her directing chops and helped her mature. Life itself intervened too, helping her play the industry game. “Being a mother, I know now there are ways you can fight for things and get your way without being so overt about it.”

Life intervened as well for Gina Prince-Bythewood, who first achieved fame in 2000 with the romantic comedy “Love & Basketball” but did not direct another movie until 2008, “The Secret Life of Bees,” based on Sue Monk Kidd’s coming-of-age novel in which a white girl bonds with a trio of beekeeping African-American sisters in the 1960s.

“I had two boys, so that took some time, and then I helped produce my husband’s film,” she said, referring to the screenwriter Reggie Rock Bythewood’s 2003 film, “Biker Boyz.” “And I developed two different projects that didn’t go through, one of which was the adaptation of the Wally Lamb book, ‘I Know This Much Is True,’ and that was a shock when that didn’t come about.”

But some self-imposed pressures also weighed on Ms. Prince-Bythewood. Though the critical acclaim and box-office success of “Love & Basketball” brought many scripts her way, “you still felt that as a black director, you had to prove yourself even harder, no matter what people were saying about this great renaissance of black film.”

She is slightly more optimistic now in the afterglow of the success of “The Secret Life of Bees,” Which earned nearly $40 million. Except for Tyler Perry’s last, “The Family That Preys,” no film directed by an African-American has performed better at the box office in the past year.

“I’m getting scripts, probably not as many as you think,” she said. “But I’m now focused on writing and rewriting something that I was working on before ‘Secret Life of Bees’ came my way two years ago, and I know now that I can get my script read by everybody, and the doors will be opened wider.”

For that Ms. Prince-Bythewood can thank the true African-American powerbroker in the film world, one more powerful than Mr. Perry or Mr. Lee: a onetime rap-music performer and television sitcom star named Will Smith. He, along with his wife, the actress Jada-Pinkett Smith, and his African-American producing partner, James Lassiter, produced “The Secret Life of Bees.”

“Will Smith has already made a huge difference, and he’s really just begun,” said Bob Berney, a movie production and marketing analyst who once headed Picturehouse, the now-defunct independent film distributor (and consultant for “Cadillac Records”). “He now has the clout to green-light whatever he wants to make, and he has the power to pick and choose whomever he wants to direct.”

Though the success of movies like “The Secret Life of Bees” perpetually makes black filmmakers more hopeful about their prospects, African-American films still have barriers to break. “The biggest,” Mr. Berney said, “is outside the U.S. where the perception remains within the industry that the international audience for African-American product is close to zero. And yet when you consider the global popularity of hip-hop culture and by extension, black culture, you have to wonder whether this perception comes from outmoded thinking from international buyers who aren’t in tune with today’s audience.”

There are also those who wonder whether the paradigm for success for African-Americans in film has changed to the point where the very notion of “black-oriented product” needs revising.

“Twenty, even 10 years ago, the only way you could see actors like Denzel Washington or Cuba Gooding or even Will Smith was in an African-American movie,” said Zola Mashariki, senior vice-president for production at Fox Searchlight, which distributed “The Secret Life of Bees.” “Now you find that almost every mainstream movie has a black presence, whether in a big-budget action movie or even a comedy geared towards mass audiences.

“So to some extent, that’s a foregone conclusion. What this means for movies whose core target audience is black is that we have to give them something that they’re not getting in the mainstream, which are stories that reflect back their own direct experience, and I think that’s something Tyler Perry has done. This doesn’t mean you’re not hoping for some crossover success. You always want that. But you don’t want that core audience to feel left out, that the movie’s not speaking to their own lives.”

The “Obama factor” could have an impact too.

“I don’t think it means there’s necessarily going to be this flood of black films,” Ms. Prince-Bythewood said. “But I think it will help retrain audiences to be more open to different kinds of black experience. The fact that the most prominent family in America over the next four years will be a black family will help broaden the perception among nonblack audiences that they’re just like them in many cases. And this can only help in terms of crossover, which is something that needs to happen to take African-American film to the next step.”

Yet Ms. Prince-Bythewood and other black directors still temper such utopian thoughts. In hard times like these, struggling to transcend conventional boundaries can be a color-blind struggle. “You could get caught up by racism in Hollywood and everywhere else,” said Lee Daniels, a producer of “Monster’s Ball” and whose adaptation of Sapphire’s novel, “Push,” about the struggles of a Harlem teenager for self-respect, will have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “But it’s as difficult for me as it is for white independent filmmakers to get stuff made. So it’s not about black or white, and the minute you wrap yourself up in these concepts, you’ve put yourself out of the running. I just look for material that’s truthful, and I have to believe that if I can identify with it, the audience will too.”

I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.