Black History Month At Cinema Arts Centre

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Cinema Arts Centre celebrates African American History Month with a diverse selection entertaining and enlightening movies and guests from February 17 through 27. Cinema Arts Centre is located at 423 Park Ave, Huntington 631-423-7611.

Tickets $9 Members / $13 Public  (except Pariah shows, regular admission) Event Tickets can be purchased online, www.CinemaArtsCentre.org at the box office during theatre hours or by calling Brown Paper Tickets toll free at 1-800-838-3006

Begins Friday, February 17 (Call 631-423-FILM for showtimes or go to www.CinemaArtsCentre.org )
PARIAH
Guests from the highly- acclaimed cast to be announced 

Seventeen-year-old Alike (pronounced A-leekay and perfectly played by Adepero Oduye) is a young woman who exists in two worlds. In one, she lives harmoniously in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood with her middle-class, conservative parents, Audrey (Kim Wayans) and Arthur (Charles Parnell). She is a traditionally feminine, obedient daughter who does well in school. The other side of Alike’s life is spent with her out-of-the-closet best friend Laura (Pernell Walker), dancing in gay clubs, embracing her nascent identity as a lesbian and seeking her first serious girlfriend. It’s inevitable that these worlds will collide. Gaining confidence and fervently wishing to live openly without shame, Alike is impatient to disclose the truth but ultimately unsure about fully revealing herself to her family — until circumstances force her hand. Pariah is about much more than deciding whether to come out to the world. There isn’t a parent alive who won’t identify with Audrey’s anxieties or world-weary Arthur’s soft spot for his daughter. And who among us has not deeply feared the revelation of a secret? It is the specificity of the story and characters in Pariah that results in the film’s universal appeal and its wide-ranging emotional power. USA, 2011, 86 min.

Monday, February 20 at 7:30pm
JOSEPHINE BAKER: BLACK DIVA IN A WHITE MAN’S WORLD
In Person: Jean Claude Baker and Jarry Baker. Jean Claude will sign copies of his new book about his mother: Josephine: The Hungry Heart

Arevealing documentary about one of the most famous and popular performing artists of the 20th century. Her legendary banana belt dance created theater history. The film portrays the artist in the mirror of European colonial clichés as well as a resistance fighter, an ambulance driver during WW11, and an outspoken activist against racial discrimination involved in the worldwide Black Consciousness movement of the 20th century. For black Americans, Baker became ‘a role model’. Baker herself “wasn’t allowed to be the real American she wanted to be.” In an article she says, “I had been suffocating in the United States…A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn’t stand it any more…” During the mid-1920s Baker found fame in Paris, performing at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees and eventually the Folies Bergeres. It came at a cost; she often performed in erotic costumes with racist overtones. The dance routines are seen as distasteful now, but at the time it was an aspect of a black popular culture forced to adapt to white tastes. Baker’s career spanned fifty years, and she is portrayed as a true superstar, one with grace and humility. Black Americans loved her, the French referred to her as their “Black Venus” and in the last years of her life white American audiences gave her the standing ovation she longed for. USA, 2006, 45 min.

Wednesday, February 22 at 7:30pm
THE BLACK POWER MIX TAPE: 1967-1975
In Person: Jamal Joseph, author and member of New York Black Panther 21

In Person: Jamal Joseph, member of New York Black Panther 2l, filmmaker and Chair of the Columbia University Film School. He will be interviewed by Warrington Hudlin, filmmaker, film curator and internet producer. He is President of the Black Filmmakers Foundation. Mr. Joseph will be signing his new book, Panther Baby.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 among other things is an extraordinary feat of editing and archival research, and takes up a familiar period in American history from a fresh and fascinating angle. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s Swedish television journalists traveled to the United States with the intention of “showing the country as it really is.” Some of the images and interviews they collected have been assembled by Goran Hugo Olsson into a roughly chronological collage that restores a complex human dimension to the racial history of the era. The film begins at a moment when the concept of black power was promoted by Stokely Carmichael, a veteran of the freedom rides early in the decade, who, like many young activists, had grown frustrated with the Gandhian, nonviolent philosophy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Carmichael, who later moved to Guinea and took the name Kwame Ture, is remembered for the militancy of his views and his confrontational, often slashingly witty speeches, but the Swedish cameras captured another side of him. In the most touching and arresting scene in “Mixture” he interviews his mother, Mabel, gently prodding her to talk about the effects of poverty and discrimination on her family. So how much has changed and how has the change taken place. How did we get from the America of Stokely Carmichael to the America of Barack Obama? We will see and hear commentaries from Harry Belafonte, Stokely Carmichael, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Danny Glover, Bobby Seale among others. Sweden, 2011, 100 min.

Monday, February 27 at 7:30pm
FROM MAMBO TO HIP HOP: A SOUTH BRONX TALE
In Person: Director.Henry Chalfant & Producer Elena Martinez

Moderator: DJ Kool Herc, founder of Hip-Hop

This film tells the story about the creative life of the South Bronx beginning with the Puerto Rican migration and the adoption of Cuban rhythms to create the New York salsa sound; continuing with the fires that destroyed the neighborhood but not the creative spirit of its people; chronicling the rise of hip hop from the ashes; and ending with reflections on the power of the neighborhood’s music to ensure the survival of several generations of its residents, and in the process, take the world’s pop culture by storm. USA, 2006, 60 min.

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