LOADING
Directed by Oscar Micheaux | 93 minutes | 15+ | 100th Anniversary |
11:00am Sunday, 1 Jun | Pink Flamingo Down Under | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes
SEE THROUGH HIS RIGHTEOUS FACADE
Oscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith—a bigger-than-life American folk hero and independent cinema maverick.
The son of freed slaves, Micheaux roamed America as a Pullman porter before making his first mark as a homesteader in South Dakota—and going on from there to become the king of the "race cinema" industry, producing and/or directing nearly forty films during a time of Jim Crow segregation when African-American artists were not welcome in Hollywood.
On its 100th anniversary, experience Micheaux’s silent masterpiece Body and Soul on the big screen! In this good versus bad twin melodrama, Paul Robeson (in his screen debut) plays both an escaped convict posing as a minister and the convict’s honest yet penniless brother. Controversial in its time for its scathing critique of a faith corrupted, it remains a dizzying and ambitious work of outsider provocation.
SIMILAR FILMS: Night of the Hunter (1955), The Unknown (1927), Lord Shango (1975)
“Micheaux’s work is proof positive that Black filmmaking has been political—a tool not only for appealing directly to a Black public filling the era’s segregated movie houses, but also for advancing keen social arguments—since the very beginning.” - K Austin Collins, Vanity Fair
"Oscar Micheaux inspires me." - Kai Perrignon, BUFF Head Programmer
Co-Presented with The Melbourne Cinémathèque
Country: United States
Year: 1925
Language: English