Richard Wright The KERA radio story: The expanded online story: Elaine Johnson: “Richard Wright was probably one of the first books that I read. But I didn’t remember Black Boy and so when I read it again, I found it quite interesting that a lot of the racism – to me, it’s like, ‘Ooh, this [...]
Irma P. Hall didn’t plan for a career in the movies. While many actors move to Hollywood, wait tables and hit the audition circuit, Ms. Hall was busy teaching French, Spanish and English in Dallas at Booker T. Washington Technical High School among other places. It wasn’t until a director spotted her at the relatively [...]
One of the great losses in North Texas arts came two years ago when Fort Worth’s Bruce Wood Dance Company folded after a decade of homegrown modern choreography that traveled the world. Fallen Angel, written, produced, directed and edited by first-time Cowtown filmmaker Mark Whittier for $2,000, takes us backstage as the company prepares for [...]
Last night, friends and music lovers gathered to pay tribute to Marchel Ivery at Sammons Jazz. This morning, I got a call from Hope Crouch, the mother of Marchel’s young daughter, Gloria Shalom Crouch. Here’s what she’d like to pass on from the evening: “Gloria wore a lively pink blouse boasting “I Get My Good [...]
Champ: The Steve Mitchell Story is one of the few films you’ll ever see that leaves you both uplifted and heartbroken. The documentary by Dallas filmmaker Mark Birnbaum (The Big Buy, Stop the Presses), focuses on Steve Mitchell, an Italy, Texas, man claiming to be the real life Rocky. It’s hard to argue with that [...]
Years before AFI-Dallas, before Lone Star in Fort Worth, before the plethora of film festivals that have popped up in the past decade, the Dallas Video Festival was bringing adventurous programming to North Texas. Only the USA Film Festival is older. As the video festival enters its third decade yet again anchored at a new [...]
Not the most current projection format At this year’s Dallas Video Festival, running Thursday to Sunday at the Dallas Angelika, the films will be projected through iTunes. Artistic director Bart Weiss believes his is the first film festival to take this approach. How it works: Filmmakers delivered QuickTime movies on a hard drive, flash/thumb drive [...]
Photo courtesy of www.storycorps.net Dave Isay, creator of the StoryCorps series heard every Friday during KERA‘s Morning Edition, is traveling the country to celebrate the paperback release of Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project. Monday night, the former radio producer brought these tales of the unsung [...]
The Dallas institute of Humanities and Culture presents its first “Festival of Ideas” this weekend. What in the world is a “festival of ideas”? Basically, it’s a quartet of public panels, each anchored by a guest speaker who is either a journalist-pundit (The New York Times‘ David Brooks, for instance) or a policy advocate (Maya [...]
Andrew Windy Boy recalling the trauma of Indian boarding school in Our Spirits Don’t Speak English I’ve been attending the Dallas Video Festival since the mid-1990s when I started writing about television for The Dallas Morning News. Unlike conventional film festivals, DVF was designed so restless viewers could sample pieces of different work by moving [...]
