The 12th Edition of the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival appropriately began with a tribute documentary about August Wilson. August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand celebrates the 70th year of his birth. Wilson’s family was in attendance, and Constanza Romero, Wilson’s widow, encouraged Seattle to accept August as one of our own. She said he was very happy living here. They had fallen in love but lived in different cities and had to choose between here or Portland. Seattle had a stronger theater community, and that was the tiebreaker. Sorry Portland, they moved here, and yes, he’s one of us now.
The 90 minute documentary aired on PBS in February. WQED, the PBS affiliate in Pittsburgh where Wilson grew up, produced the film with the full cooperation of Ms. Romero. Director Sam Pollard has skillfully woven many impressions from Wilson’s friends, colleagues, family with scenes from his plays to give viewers a solid feeling for this amazing artist.
Wilson set himself the task of writing one play for each decade of a full century (10 plays) anchored by the lives of black people. When he learned he was dying from liver cancer he concentrated on his 10th play and finished it before his death in 2005, at the age of 60. The project took him 20 years. The Greene Space, WNYC, and WQXR in New York have recorded all ten plays and will begin to broadcast them on selected radio stations this Spring (thegreenespace.org).
Wilson was deeply involved in the Black Arts Movement, the flowering of black artistic expression that emerged concurrently with the efforts of Blacks for political, social, and economic parity with whites in the 60s and 70s. After he leaves Pittsburgh for St. Paul, his nascent talent won him acceptance into the National Playwrights Conference. It was here at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut that he met Lloyd Richards. This was another fortuitous event for Wilson. It led to a long and productive collaboration between Wilson, the writer—and Richards, the legend in the black and white theater worlds for directing Raisin in the Sun. They would collaborate on six of Wilson’s plays.
Samuel Coleridge’s idea that the arts require a “willing suspension of disbelief” is fully utilized in Wilson’s craft. He asks us to suspend disbelief in ghosts (Piano Lesson) and that a woman could be 300 years old (Gem of the Ocean). You learn that he had that special gift of great playwrights: he listened for the cadences of meaning in the speech in the taken-for-granted chatter and folk traditions of black people, and he trusted the voices of characters that sought life and expression though his writing. Here’s his take on the blues:
I think the blues are the best literature that blacks have created since we’ve been here. And it’s a lot of philosophical ideas; I call it our sacred book. What I have attempted to do is mine those idea, those cultural ideas and attitudes, and give them to my characters.
This was a fitting way to open the festival. The forty films showing how black lives matter featured this year cover subjects ranging from love stories, to mountain climbers, to AIDS activists in South Africa, to hip hop, and to immigrant experiences. Here are the titles in the program:
Horeta—The Journey Beyond Culture |
A Couple of Friends
The Godmother
of Rock and Roll
(Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
|
The Greater the Weight
American Ascent
|
100 Years After
Birth of a Nation
Within Our Gates
|
Elem. School Screening:
Selected Shorts
|
Speechless
Positively Beautiful
|
Youth & Elder Screening:
Selected Shorts
Our Fathers & Sons & Love
|
Discovering Dave: Spirit
Captured in Clay
|
Middle School Screening:
Selected Shorts
|
Ladies Night:
Learning This Skin
Steps of Faith
|
Late Night Screening:
Last Night
|
Blame
The Summoning
|
Unwelcomed Conversation
Christmas Wedding Baby
|
Late Night Screening:
Gonna Sip that Sip,
Hit that Dip
Lords of BSV
|
Flimmaker Brunch |
Shorts Screening | Njinga, Queen of Angola | In the Morning |
Late Night: Maybe Dreams
do come True
|
Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner, Naija Edition
We Came to Sweat
|
Cincinnati Goddamn |
One hundred years after it’s release, D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation continues to influence the negative depiction of blacks in white American media. On Monday, April 13, this festival will have a screening of this film along with a lecture and discussion about its enduring influences at the NW African American Museum, 2300 Massachusetts St.
Langston Hughes African American Film Festival. 9 Days, 40 films. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th Avenue South. Tickets are $12 adults, $10 weekday matinees, and $7 seniors & youth; $25 closing night screening and reception. Find complete schedule listings and descriptions at the festival’s website, or call 206 684.4758. Festival closes on Sunday, April 19, with the 6 PM screening of Cincinnati Goddamn, a documentary on how grassroots activism and federal investigations exposed Cincinnati’s brutal police practices. Runs through April 19.