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the black list Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Live from SXSW: Film Festival Madness

Filed under: SXSW », Festival Reports », Cinematical Indie »



Saturday was a very busy day here at SXSW. We were up absurdly late on Friday night, and then awakened at 8AM by a car alarm going off outside our window, followed by all four of my kids' soccer coaches calling me from OKC to let me know that today's games were canceled due to cold weather. Thanks, guys, but I'm in Austin. After the panel this morning, I grabbed lunch with filmmaker AJ Schnack (Kurt Cobain: About a Son), who also writes a very excellent blog called All These Wonderful Things.

We gabbed about documentaries, traveling for film fests, balancing work and family, and lots of other stuff; he's a supremely nice guy and it's always fun chatting with someone who's as big a dork for documentary films as I am. Our lunch ran long due to crowds at all the area restaurants, so I missed the screening of We Are Wizards and had to bump it out to a later day in the fest.

Sundance Review: The Black List

Filed under: Documentary », Independent », Sundance », Theatrical Reviews », Cinematical Indie »



What do you get when renowned portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell decide to collaborate on a film on black culture, inspired by the idea of a coffee table book? You get The Black List (recently bought by HBO Documentaries and retitled The Black List: Volume One), a portrait of black America that is at once intimate and larger than life. Picture a gorgeous coffee table book filled with portraits of famous African-American men and women, brought to life and saying the most erudite and occasionally unexpected things, and you have an inkling of what's been captured in this film.

Born over a lunch date between Greefield-Sanders and Mitchell, The Black List, the title of which is a deliberate play on the negative connotation often given to the word "black," was initially conceived as a book, but Greenfield-Sanders quickly realized that it needed to be a film, done as a series of interviews with prominent African-Americans. Mitchell also has a book in the works that will flesh on the snippets of interviews in the film into longer stories.
 
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