Roxbury Film Festival: Movies in the Key of Black Life

Roxbury Film Festival
Friday, August 1-Sunday, August 3
Various Times and Locations
Tickets and full schedule.

The 2008 Roxbury Film Festival, which sponsored events throughout the week, begins in earnest tonight. It's a showcase of movies by, for, and about people of color. Screening more than 50 features and shorts, the festival covers a wide array of themes, touching on aspects of everyday black life and culture, history, injustice, poverty, family life, and decolonization. The festival includes both documentaries and fictional films in a smattering of modes, from broadly comic to deadly serious.

A good place to start is the acclaimed documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which screened Monday and will screen again on Sunday. Directed by Gini Reticker, the movie chronicles the exploits of thousands of Liberian women who, joined by their opposition to warlord Charles Taylor, ended Liberia's second civil war, brought to power Africa's first elected female head of state, and began to heal the schism between Liberia's Muslims and Christians. It's a story not widely known in the US, but the film argues that the episode deserves to be viewed next to Gandhi's non-cooperation movement as an example of the power of concerted non-violent protest.

Black music gets recognized with three movies. Welcome to the Terrordome, directed by Robert Patrick Spruill, tells the story of rap group Public Enemy's 20 year career, its controversies and triumphs. Ava DuVernay's This is the Life takes a look at the hip hop independents who came together at a health food shop in South Central LA. Train of Sound, a four minute short made Nicholas Wu, screens with the "Youth Produced Films" program and takes a look at the buskers on the T.

Traces of the Trade: A Story of the Deep North is a must-see. After filmmaker Katrina Browne discovers that her New England ancestors were the largest-scale slave trading family in the United States, she follows the course of the slave trade, from Africa, to the West Indies, to her hometown in Rhode Island, exposing the persistence of slavery even in the northeast.

Still from This is the Life courtesy Roxbury Film Festival.