Every August the Film Center presents the Black Harvest Film Festival, a four-week schedule of films drawn from the black experience, and every festival kicks off with a gala shorts program, “A Black Harvest Feast.” The five shorts screening this year all seem like calling-card films, fairly conventional dramas with good production values and sometimes drippy music cues, meant to win entrée into the professional world of TV and movies. But there’s real talent here, especially in two sharp domestic dramas. The Christmas Tree (12 min.), written, directed, and shot locally by Angel Kristi Williams, noses into the most uncomfortable corners of a parent-child relationship, much like Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. Ka’ramuu Kush is excellent as a down-at-the-heels father who gets custody of his daughter for the holiday and takes her out to cut down their own tree, only to be humbled and morally compromised after the tree is ripped off from the flatbed of his pickup truck. Less complex but just as sincere, Rachel I. Johnson’s White Sugar in a Black Pot (18 min.) shows a family pushed to the breaking point when the mother, making decent money and desperate to escape from the housing project where they live, clashes with the father over the possibility of buying a house with a subprime mortage.
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Check out siskelfilmcenter.org for the rest of this week’s programs, and check the New Reviews section in forthcoming weeks for these Black Harvest documentaries: John Paley, Ross Finkel, and Trevor Martin’s Ballplayer: Pelotero (8/12, 8/13), about baseball hopefuls from the Dominican Republic; Katie Dellamaggiore’s Brooklyn Castle (8/26, 8/30), about chess revitalizing the lives of inner-city kids; S. Epatha Merkerson and Rockell Metcalf’s The Contradictions of Fair Hope (8/19, 8/20), which revisits the “benevolent societies” of freed blacks after the Civil War; Pamela Sherrod Anderson’s The Curators of Dixon School (8/12, 8/16), a look at Chicago’s own Dixon Elementary Public school; and Jonathan Gayles’s White Scripts and Black Supermen (8/26, 8/27), a history of black superheroes in American comic books and strips. We’ll also review three dramatic features: William L. Cochran’s Englewood (The Growing Pains in Chicago) (8/17, 8/23), a story of three pals trying to make it through their senior year of high school in the title ‘hood; Sidney Mansa Winters’s Father’s Day (8/27, 8/29), in which an Iraq war veteran visiting his son is swept into a dangerous intrigue; and Ya’ke Smith’s Wolf (8/14, 8/15), about a teenage boy who’s sexually involved with a preacher at his church.
The Curators of Dixon School Inspiring and sobering in similar measure, this documentary by Pamela Sherrod Anderson focuses on Arthur Dixon Elementary School in Chatham, where principal Joan Dameron Crisler raised academic performance while making art a priority. Not only were impoverished students engaged and empowered through art classes, but Crisler developed a permanent collection of Afrocentric paintings and sculptures, which are displayed unprotected in the halls and respected by the student body. Anderson also broadens her narrative to include Sharon Dale, who became Dixon’s principal when Crisler took a job mentoring other administrators, and Carol Briggs, who got her start as Crisler’s assistant principal and struggles to develop a similar renaissance, stressing reading, as principal of Alfred D. Kohn School in Roseland. Their dedication is impressive, though end credits reveal how much their efforts have been defunded by an ailing Chicago school system. —J.R. Jones 80 min. Anderson attends the screenings. Sun 8/12, 3 PM, and Thu 8/16, 6 PM.
August 23-29
Fri 8/3, 6:30 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center; tickets are $25, $20 for students, and $15 for Film Center members
Black Harvest Film Festival
Fri 8/3–8/30, Gene Siskel Film Center
