Please join us for opening night of the Diaspora Festival of Black and Independent film. The festival includes premiere screenings from across the diaspora. All screenings are FREE and OPEN to the public.
BODY AND SOUL: AN AMERICAN BRIDGE
Dir.: Robert Philipson| 2017| USA| 58 min
Out of all the cross-cultural encounters that have resulted in the richness of American popular music, none has been so prominent or so fraught with fraternity and conflict as the relationships between African Americans and American Jews. BODY AND SOUL: AN AMERICAN BRIDGE aims to tease out the strands of this cultural knot by focusing on the early performance history of the jazz standard, “Body and Soul,” one of the most recorded songs in the jazz repertoire.
JONAH
Dir. Andrew Michael Ellis | 2017| USA | Shorts Narr | 6 min
An interview with a former African American slave accompanies a powerful dance vignette of an urban man in extremis. The juxtaposition of past and present raises questions about inherited trauma and the possibility of regeneration.