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Film maker Charles Burnett after NightJohn Showing |
Although the Festival doesn't officially begin until Friday night, there was a pre-festival showing at the Anchorage Museum of Charles Burnett's NightJohn Thursday night. I heard someone describe Burnett as the best American film maker that no one knows. But the other film makers there all talked about being in the same room with a legend.
Here, for example, is Fanny, Annie, and Danny film maker Chris Brown talking about Charles Burnett. (This is a very short video.)
This is a 1996 film about a slave who'd escaped to freedom in the North on his third try and then came back to the South so he could teach other slaves to read. This was a Disney film, but with a black director and tells the story from the slaves' point of view. Powerful stuff.
But I don't have time to do too much except put up some pictures. I'm not putting up any pictures from the after film talk because even I have some standards about photo quality and the ones I took, well the documentation of the event doesn't erase the low quality of the pictures. But here are a couple of the reception afterward.
Anyone complaining about the expense of $8 festival tickets should have been at the museum tonight. Not only was this 1996 film free, but so was the spread afterward.
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Here's Burnett with a film festival volunteer.
And here he was good enough to pose with film maker Chris Brown, whose Fanny, Annie, and Danny plays Saturday at 5:30pm at the Bear Tooth. I got to see it on dvd this week and the characters were so real and compelling that they seem like people I actually spent a couple of hours with.
And the third person is Dawnell Smith, the Festival general manager.