Page 15 - Ed Rampell News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 trajectory from her 1946 birth in segregated El Paso, Texas, to her family’s move, as part of the Gr...

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 was originally screened at PAFF in 2010 and again in 2017. I am repurposing parts of my 2017 review h...

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 three favorite Aloha “State” songs, “Hawaiian Soul,” about the fabled Native activist Georg...

‘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 Panthers’ militancy, Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover (played by Martin Sheen) unleashes COINTE...

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.