Page 8 - Ed Rampell News Today

Black Movies Matter: Pan African Film Festival Goes Virtual The twenty-ninth annual film festival showcases 200-plus productions by and about Black people from forty-five countries. American Skin, Nate Parker’s fiction film about police brutality, and Abby Ginzberg’s The Pan African Film Festival is all about bringing films from near and far about the global Black experience to U.S. audiences who might not otherwise have the chance to view them. Truth to Power traces Lee’s traje...

Longtime political prisoner Geronimo Pratt (aka Geronimo Ji Jaga) The 29th Pan African Film Festival has moved online, taking place Feb. 28–March 14. This year’s PAFF is screening at least three Black Panther Party-related films: The documentary Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me and Judas and the Black Messiah, probably Hollywood’s best political feature in years. The third is a reprise of the 2009 documentary 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers, which w...

Polynesian slam poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. 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 that recently screened as part of 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...

‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ Is an Urgent, Must-See Biopic A stirring ‘power to the people’ film depicts the FBI’s persecution of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Director/co-writer Shaka King’s thrilling Judas and the Black Messiah explosively dramatizes the struggle of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton (played by Daniel Kaluuya) and the FBI’s persecution of Hampton and the Black Panther Party. Threatened by the charismatic, fearless Hampton and the...

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.

By Any Means Necessary: The FBI vs. Civil Rights This new documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at the agency’s dirty war against the ‘Black Messiah.’ The Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director for nearly half a century, J. Edgar Hoover, had a carefully groomed image, cultivated by fawning pop culture and news reporting. The agency and its employees were seen as crime fighters busting the mob and Cold Warriors investigating “commies.” But MLK/FBI, a new...