This episode of the podcast begins checking back in with The Brooklyn Heights Cinema owner Kenn Lowy. When we last talked with Lowy, he was in the midst of what turned out to be a successful crowd sourced fundraiser in order to convert the theater to digital. Since then the building has been sold and Kenn tells us that after 44 years, The Cinema will be shuttering. Kenn has new plans for the theater by moving to DUMBO. We’ll check back in with Lowy again soon.
Brothers Alex Smith and Andrew Smith made their first indie feature back in 2002 with “The Slaughter Rule”. That film introduced the world to such talent as Ryan Gosling and Amy Adams. Now the twin filmmakers are back with a new film called “Winter in The Blood” which stars Chaske Spencer (“Twilight” series) and David Morse (“The Green Mile”), Spencer plays Virgil First Raise who wakes with a hangover in a roadside ditch on the hardscrabble plains of Montana. Haunted by the death of his beloved older brother Mose on a cattle drive twenty years earlier, Virgil is a dead man walking. The film is currently screening at the IFC Center and is being distributed by Kino Lorber.
My last guest is filmmaker and photographer Thomas Allen Harris, director of the new documentary “Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People“. Harris’ film is a unique examination of they way black photographers—and their subjects—have used the camera as a tool for social change from the time photography was invented to the present. Using the family album as a rubric, Harris confronts the way images of “blackness” have affected his own family and sense of self-worth as an African American. The film is part of a larger transmedia project that includes the website/traveling roadshow Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, which invites audiences to share and upload their own family photographs and participate in the creation of a national family archive that can form communities.
