Jimmie Fails

Danny Glover’s narration sets the tone for The Last Black Man Standing. Directed by Joe Talbot, The Last Black Man Standing is a haunting story about holding on to the past and stories one has been told about the past to manage day-to-day living especially in the wake of loss. Jimmie Fails stars as himself, a young black man who has come of age in the city of San Francisco. His family has lost a magnificent Victorian home in the Fillmore district, and this loss, or shall I write, death, has affected Jimmie to such an extent that he returns from time-to-time to give it a facelift much to the consternation of its newest inhabitants. His only consolation is an anecdote handed down to him by his father, James Sr. Jimmie’s grandfather built the house with his bare hands in the 1940s, and it is this history that endears him to the house. When the new inhabitants vacate, Jimmie considers reclaiming the house.

But his father, James Sr., lacerates his ideas with a disturbing reality check.  In spite of his father’s warning, Jimmie and his best friend, Montgomery, takeover the house. The interior is fabulous. Adam Newport-Berry, cinematographer, ensures a full sweep of its grandeur accentuated by high ceilings and wood floors, a sauna, staircase, and a hidden room. Once moved in, Jimmie and Montgomery just … Be …

On the whole, The Last Man in San Francisco is a heartwarming film about a Black man’s love for his city and how an iconic architectural structure shaped and molded him. Talbot deftly enfolds within the film issues of housing, gentrification, and displacement in San Francisco that challenge Jimmie’s every emotion. Questions of the African American energies that went into the building of the city, and it is the history of their blood, sweat, and toil that makes it difficult for Jimmie to wrestle his heart away from San Francisco.

With every stage in life, we must move on or else remain stagnant as has Montgomery, who lives and takes care of his grandfather in a house overlooking a contaminated bay. Ironically, it is Montgomery who challenges his friend to explore the horizon waiting for him after he learns the truth about why Jimmie and his family lost their home.

What Montgomery does with the information sets Jimmie on an entirely different course.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays through August 8 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Also playing through August 8 is Wild Rose, a film by Tom Harper about a rebellious country singer in Glasgow who dreams of stardom in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Pauline Burley as Violette and Alban Lenoir as Jean

How do women cope in the time of war? In our own history, we know women went to work and managed households until war’s end. In her film The Sower, filmmaker Marine Fransoun marks out the day-to-day activities of women who have to fend for themselves in a remote mountain farming village. The time is 1851. The place, France. A brutal coup d’etat occurs and, on orders by President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, all men either are arrested and/or or killed. The women and children assume the responsibility of managing life as a result of this violent state of affairs.

The Sower is Marie Fransoun’s directorial debut she has based on the novel by Violette Ailhoud, written in 1919 at 84 years of age. Rather than using the original title L’homme Semence translated as The Man Semen, Fransoun entitles the film from the same name of the painting by Jean Francois Millet. She deftly handles every scene; Alain Duplantier’s extreme long shots of the landscape invoke visions of The Gleaners in the art of Jean Millet or The Sweatgrass Carriers in the art of South Carolina artist, Jonathan Green.

Jean and the women

Bereft and traumatized, the women band together to farm, harvest crops, and tend to the children. Some women are mothers; some have experienced intimacy. Others find themselves with no prospects for either venture. So, they make a vow: If a man comes to the village, each of them will share him as their lover. There’s just one thing, though. No one asks the question, what shall we do if I fall in love with him and he with me? Jean, the man, (played with delicate sensuality by Alban Lenoir) arrives in the village, and he is fine-looking and he is mysterious and he is young. The women remark, “If he was the only one left, you wouldn’t make a fuss” and “You’d be happy to wrap your legs around him” or “I think he fancies you; he’s so handsome.”

There is an interesting twist to the story. Pauline Burley plays Violette, the young woman who spies Jean ambling along on the hilltop, and their interaction threatens to upend the overall peace in the village. Each actress communicates character reaction to Jean’s arrival with exceptional range. Feelings are revealed via side glances as she harvests. Their hearts beat intense desire wrapped in anxiety and sexual frustration.

One of the women reminds Juliette of the bargain

Alain Duplantier’s cinematography interposes scenic space between dialogue and action to prevent emotions running high throughout the village from overwhelming the narrative; Fransoun’s direction allows the story to breathe in and to breathe out but keeping in focus the simmering conflicts. Alban Lenoir interprets Jean well as a stranger among women caught up in their sexual politics. “You’re all mad—stark mad” he retorts. Remarkable to the story, Fransoun agrees with Jean, and relieves the character of his anxiety in a very practical way.

The Sower plays through April 4 at the Ross Media Arts Center. English Subtitles.

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We’ve been bombarded lately with this site of children in those, you know, very very difficult situations and you always have the feeling that they are paying the highest price for our faults.

~ Nadine Labaki, writer director

When life is neglectful and unkind, if you want to live, you will find a way out. Set in the small country of Lebanon, Nadine Labaki dramatizes the story of Zain (played by Syrian refugee Zain al Rafeea), a 12-year-old boy who sues his parents for the crime of birthing him and neglecting him and his sister, Sahar (played by Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam).

Yordanos Shiferaw as Rahil

After tragedy strikes his sister and his parents do nothing to protect her, he flees from his home and survives by his wits in the streets of Beirut. On his journey, Rahil, an Ethiopian migrant worker (played by Yordanos Shiferaw) shelters him with her infant son, Yonas (played by Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). Eventually, Zain becomes the sole caretaker of Yonas after a series of events entrap his mother.

Taking a cue from the Italian neo-realism of Vittorio de Sica’s film The Bicycle Thief, Labaki plucked her actors from the streets of Beirut and produced a most dramatic and inspirational story of rebellious youth whose story leans to Francois Truffault’s The 400 Blows of the French New Wave era in cinema. Even the title of the film finds currency in literature and biblical history.

This is a word that has been used throughout history in French literature and English literature an even Arabic literature to signify chaos … to signify disorder. Originally it’s was a biblical village and it was sort of cursed by Jesus because of the chaos that was in it.

~ Nadine Labaki

Capernaum is riveting in its delivery. Zain inhabits every chaotic scene with an intensity that you will be hard pressed not to attempt to reach for the screen to carry him. It is one thing for Zain to manage his own life but when he assumes responsibility for Yonas, the story transforms into a heart-rending journey. Christopher Auon’s cinematography interprets the unbearable day-to-day, filming against the backdrop of a nimiety of issues: extreme poverty, slums, immigration and migrant workers, children and forced labor, the separation of children from families, child brides. Zain’s nit and grit fail to alleviate the distress; every dramatization of his daily life is overwhelming.

Yes. For you to be overwhelmed by all that because this is the reality and the reality is even more overwhelming than what you see is even more ugly than what you see in the film …

~ Nadine Labaki

Audiences at Cannes were overwhelmed and in such awe that the filmmaker and her team won not only the Grand Jury Prize at the festival; in addition, they received a post-screening 6 minute standing ovation plus more applause on their way out of the theater. A bit of trivia, the events the Ethiopian refugee Rahil experiences in the film happened to the actress who plays her, Yordanos Shiferaw, in real life three days later after the shoot.

Capernaum plays through February 21st at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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