HE SAID....
BLACK VENUS (VENUS NOIRE)
'The film captures the dehumanization of this woman. Many of the scenes are tough to take in. Yahima Torres is magnificent in her portrayal of Sarah. She portrays Sarah's life as unbearable. Yet she shows the tender scenes as a humanized woman who was virtually regarded as an animal, according to the ideology of the day...'
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FAMILY AFFAIR
'I was hoping filmmaker Colvard would have more professional and/or clinical interviews to thoroughly explain and explore the problems these people unknowingly live with these issues, and how they can ultimately overcome the effects of broken lives...'
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Gerald Wright
National Association of Black Journalists
HDfest.com
Film Showcase
SHE SAID....
By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the 1997 film
The Apostle Robert Duvall plays a white Southern Christian fundamentalist preacher and murderer on the lam seeking redemption. The film is literally cluttered with images of devout blacks, from black women swaying in the breeze at a big tent church revival to a particularly indelible church scene of dozens of black men chanting “Jesus” in rapturous response to Duvall’s pulpit-pounding call. I found The Apostle perversely fascinating because it trotted out this totally revisionist romanticized narrative of black obeisance to yet another charismatic but flawed white renegade savior figure in Louisiana (where, contrary to Hollywood flim-flammery, most of the congregations are racially segregated). These popular fantasies of black religiosity always seem to revolve around images of good, matronly black women eternally quivering with a strategic “Amen” or “can I get a witness;” subject to break out into a Blues Brothers back flip down the church aisle at any moment.
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Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of Blackfemlens, a journal of progressive commentary and literature, and the author of Mortal Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America. She is member of the Women Film Critics Circle, a commentator on Pacifica's Some Of Us Are Brave on KPFK 90.7FM, and a reporter for the LA Women's Desk of the WBAI Radio Women's Collective in NY.
Listen to blackfemlens commentaries on Fridays, 6:25pm LA Time, at http://kpfk.org.
We visit two major
Housing Crisis Hotspots.
Jimmy McMillan [left of Andrew Cuomo], famously flamboyant founder of
The Rent Is Too Damn High Party, stops by to share landlord from hell intrigue he's confronted in NYC. The Vietnam veteran, rapper and persistent candidate out of nowhere standing up to all those millionaire designer politicians, is now intent on taking his bid to the 2012 US presidential election, and he'll tell us how and why.
And...This week marks the 6th anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and where homelessness, along with the ever looming threat of another hurricane to come, apparently continues in its wake. Famed SNL funnyman and the many voices of The Simpsons
Harry Shearer turns serious, with his documentary
The Big Uneasy, about the man-made Katrina cataclysm and coverups in his native New Orleans, while NPR refused to listen. And the suppressed history of a disaster that was not so natural after all.
Hosts: Mary Ann Miller and Prairie Miller
By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the 1997 film The Apostle Robert Duvall plays a white Southern Christian fundamentalist preacher and murderer on the lam seeking redemption. The film is literally cluttered with images of devout blacks, from black women swaying in the breeze at a big tent church revival to a particularly indelible church scene of dozens of black men chanting “Jesus” in rapturous response to Duvall’s pulpit-pounding call. I found The Apostle perversely fascinating because it trotted out this totally revisionist romanticized narrative of black obeisance to yet another charismatic but flawed white renegade savior figure in Louisiana (where, contrary to Hollywood flim-flammery, most of the congregations are racially segregated). These popular fantasies of black religiosity always seem to revolve around images of good, matronly black women eternally quivering with a strategic “Amen” or “can I get a witness;” subject to break out into a Blues Brothers back flip down the church aisle at any moment. 
