Mini-film festival recognizes movies against Blaxploitation

Around 1967 and 1968, a group of African American filmmakers with similar ideas about the questioning of black existence in America found themselves in the fledgling film program at UCLA. There, they collaborated on many works that strayed away from the Hollywood machine and its stereotyping of African Americans in Blaxploitation works such as "Shaft." A mini-movement sprang out of their energies that has since been referred to by many film scholars as "The L.A. Rebellion."\nA mini-film festival entitled "The L.A. Rebellion: Cinema of the Los Angeles School" will recognize this movement Saturday and Sunday. Movies will be screened between 3 and 7 p.m. on both days in Ballantine Hall room 013. All showings are free and open to the public. Free parking is available in upper and lower-level Ballantine lots by placing a City Lights or "L.A. Rebellion" flier on one's car dashboard.\nThe event is co-sponsored by the graduate course Black Cultural Studies (C793), City Lights and the Departments of Communication and Culture, Cultural Studies and American Studies. The films are in video format and were provided by the Black Film Center Archive and the Main Library's Media Reserves.\nSaturday, Haile Gerima's 1976 work "Bush Mama" will start the festival. "Bless Their Little Hearts," Billy Woodberry's 1984 directorial effort, follows. "Bush Mama" is a harrowing chronicle of a mother in the impoverished Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles who does her best to raise her daughter and deal with the loss of her love to crime. In "Bless Their Little Hearts," the patriarch of the Banks household struggles to earn money, resorting to hacking weeds and painting garages for income, resulting in the dissolving of his relationship with his wife.\nSunday, Charles Burnett's "To Sleep with Anger" will screen first, while Julie Dash's 1991 film "Daughters of the Dust" will complete the fest. The 1990 release "To Sleep with Anger" is probably the most high profile work being shown this weekend since Hollywood actor Danny Glover puts his stamp on this film with a wonderfully unnerving performance. "Anger" deals with a closely-knit L.A. family that slowly disintegrates when an old family friend (Glover) shows up on the doorstep. The concluding festival piece, "Daughters of the Dust," is a highly acclaimed piece of celluloid that is a turn-of-the-century tale about the Gullah, slave descendants who held onto their African heritage.\nRoopali Mukherjee, a communications and culture professor who also teaches the Black Cultural Studies course that is sponsoring this festival, finds the "L.A. Rebellion" to be a "very important point in black independent filmmaking."\n"It was a synergistic moment that produced gritty and aesthetically beautifully done movies," she said.\nMukherjee said she believes the festival will be a success if it "increases exposure among students" to films besides those being made in Hollywood and teaches students to have "a film literacy."\nShe said she thinks that students should come out to "L.A. Rebellion" because many will probably not have another opportunity to expand their cinematic horizons with these movies.\n"When students graduate and have nine-to-five jobs, they are never going to have time to see these films," she said. "We want to produce students that want to see more than day to day, normal movies"