Arts & Culture

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

I am a big fan of the work by actor/director/writer Nate Parker, which powerfully expresses Black consciousness and militancy in movies such as: 2012’s Red Tails about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen who were antifascists before Antifa; 2007’s fact-based The Great Debaters, which proved Blacks can excel academically and Denzel played a suspected Communist; and 2016’s The Birth of a Nation, which Parker directed, co-wrote and starred in as Nat Turner, who led America’s bloodiest uprising against slavery (see: The Last Shall Be First in "The Birth of a Nation" - Progressive.org).

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best annual Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Like love, film is a many splendored thing for PAFF. This unique filmfest screens productions in various formats and mediums – including features, documentaries, studio blockbusters like Coming 2 America, indies and animation – and also in a variety of lengths. The common thread PAFF weaves is a tapestry of works regarding the Black experience, from Timbuktu to Papua New Guinea to the Caribbean to L.A. and beyond, by and about Blacks. And often PAFF presents films that Angeleno moviegoers may never otherwise have an opportunity to view (and gives them a foothold in a world movie capital). So thanks to PAFF, I was able to behold two worthy short films.

CELESTE’S DREAM: GOOD GRIEF!

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Co-directors Royal Kennedy Rodgers and Kathy McCampbell Vance’s Hollywood’s Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story is a nonfiction biopic about the African American talent who rose to become the so-called “Architect of the Stars” when Jim Crow was still the scourge of the land. Born 1894 in L.A., Paul Revere Williams’ real-life story, overcoming adversity, is remarkable, even if it is unremarkably told in this conventionally albeit professionally made documentary.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

The sixties cliché that “the personal is political” is strikingly true in Tamara Mariam Dawit’s Finding Sally. When the Ethiopian-Canadian director/writer stumbles – at the ripe old age of 30! – upon the fact that her father and his siblings had another sister she’d never even heard of, Tamara sets out to piece together the puzzle to find out why her Aunt Sally had been missing from the picture for decades. The documentarian’s filmic voyage of discovery turns out to be much more than a merely personal journey, as Sally’s disappearance from the scene takes Tamara down the path to the revolutionary politics that engulfed Ethiopia in the 1970s.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best yearly Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s 29th annual Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Director/co-writer Lazaro Ramos’ award winning Executive Order exemplifies what I love most about PAFF: This festival gives movie buffs the opportunity to see films – often from far-flung destinations around the globe – that we might otherwise never have the chance to watch. Often these are worthy, well-made productions that PAFF is also giving access and a foothold to at Los Angeles, arguably the world’s capital of cinema (although not necessarily the capital of “world cinema” per se).

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best annual Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Undaunted, the pandemic can’t stop the Pan African Film Festival and in that immortal show biz tradition, the show must go on! Albeit virtually, as this year in order to stay cinematically safe, America’s largest and best annual Black-themed filmfest since 1992 is moving online and starting later than usual, kicking off on the last day of Black History Month. 2021’s Pan African Virtual Film + Arts Festival is taking place from Feb. 28 – March 14.

Abby Ginzberg’s Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me is a star-studded nonfiction biopic about the title character, who was the only member of Congress to have the courage and foresight to vote against the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force bill granting Pres. George W. Bush and all future presidents what Lee criticized as war-making powers that were “too broad… crazy.”

My father, Richard Rampell, was a photographer who used to exhibit his artsy black and white pictures in Manhattan’s top photo galleries. Always a good provider, Dad supported our family by teaching at Boys High in Bed Stuy, explaining: “All artists require patrons. Even Michelangelo needed patrons. By working as a teacher, I can support myself and be my own patron – and therefore just shoot whatever I want.” In this way Dad was immune from the ups and downs of the marketplace for artistes, was unfailingly able to pay our monthly bills, but was still able to exhibit his pictures alongside the greats of the photography world, such as the abstract lens meister Minor White, social realist Cornell Capa and Arthur Rothstein, that Dust Bowl poet.

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The Tidal Wave of Indigenous Cinema continues to swell with Hawaiian filmmaker Ciara Lacy’s stirring This is the Way We Rise, a poetic short about Polynesian slam poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio now playing at the Sundance Film Festival. Jamaica is the daughter of Jon Osorio, Dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, an author and renowned songwriter who composed one of my three favorite Aloha “State” songs, “Hawaiian Soul”, about the fabled Native activist George Helm.

It seems that Jamaica has picked up not only her talented dad’s way with words, but also his commitment to the struggle for the liberation of the Kānaka Maoli (indigenous people of Hawaiʻi). In Rise we see Jamaica perform slam poetry at various venues, including Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan and the White House for the Obamas and their daughters (the former president, of course, was born in Oahu – not that he ever lifted a finger to help the Hawaiians that I know of).