| American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs | |
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| Directed by | Grace Lee |
| Written by | Grace Lee |
| Produced by |
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| Starring | Grace Lee Boggs |
| Cinematography |
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| Edited by | Kim Roberts |
| Music by | Vivek Maddala |
Production companies |
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Release date | |
Running time | 82 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs is a 2013 American biographical documentary film directed by Grace Lee.
Filmmaker Grace Lee tracks the evolving beliefs and activism of philosopher Grace Lee Boggs. Viewers learn about Boggs' activist contributions in Detroit and her involvement in the Black Power movement. [2]
American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs premiered at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival. [1] It received a limited theatrical release in Los Angeles on June 20, 2014, and aired on the PBS series POV on June 30, 2014. [3]
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 83% of six reviewers gave the film a positive review; the average rating was 7/10. [4] Metacritic rated it 78/100 based on four reviews. [5] Justin Chang of Variety called it a "lively and intelligent documentary" that is "spryly paced and deftly assembled". [6] Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "In an era in which social activism is far too often derided, American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs represents a deeply moving examination of the power of a single individual to affect change." [7] Inkoo Kang of the Los Angeles Times described it as a "superb documentary" that is "admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure." [8]
Nicolas Rapold of The New York Times writes, "Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs's thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject's life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open." [9] Scholar Ronald W. Bailey, in his review, said the film's "approach works well in providing an honest, compassionate portrait of an important life we should all want to better understand," and went on to state that "I learned new things from the film that will be useful in my continuing study and teaching... It treats the subject of this Asian American woman’s life in a way that will inform people of all nationalities and highlight linkages across the divides of color/race, class, culture and nationality, consciousness, gender, and age." [10] Writing in Cineaste, critic Dan Georgakas states that Lee's "long-term commitment and craft as a director have resulted in an engaging portrait of a most remarkable woman. American Revolutionary also demonstrates that visual media can provide effective platforms for intellectual discourse." [11]
It won the Audience Awards at Los Angeles Film Festival [6] and the San Diego Asian Film Festival as well as Best Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival. [12]
In 2021, the documentary was also used as part of the May 19 Project. May 19 is the birth date of both Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama. The May 19th Project is a UCLA project meant to encourage and explore Asian American solidarity with the African American community. [13] Clips from American Revolutionary are used to highlight how Boggs and her husband James Boggs "plant visionary seeds" and to explore what solidarity looks like. [14]
James Boggs was an American political activist, auto worker and author. He was married to philosopher activist Grace Lee Boggs for forty years until his death.
Quentin Lee is a Hong Kong-born Canadian-American film writer, director, and producer. He is most notable for the television series Comedy InvAsian and feature films The People I've Slept With (2009), Ethan Mao (2004), and Shopping for Fangs (1997), which he co-directed with Justin Lin.
Outfest is an LGBTQ-oriented nonprofit that produces two film festivals, operates a movie streaming platform, and runs educational services for filmmakers in Los Angeles. Outfest is one of the key partners, alongside the Frameline Film Festival, the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival, and the Inside Out Film and Video Festival, in launching the North American Queer Festival Alliance, an initiative to further publicize and promote LGBT film.
Dustin Lance Black is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and LGBT rights activist. He is known for writing the film Milk, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2009. He has also subsequently written the screenplays for the film J. Edgar and the 2022 crime miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven.
The Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) was founded in 1980. The San Francisco-based organization, formerly known as the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), has grown into the largest organization dedicated to the advancement of Asian Americans in independent media, specifically the areas of television and filmmaking.
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction. By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American, Black Power, and Civil Rights movements.
The L.A. Rebellion film movement, sometimes referred to as the "Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers", or the UCLA Rebellion, refers to the new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s and have created a black cinema that provides an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema.
Scott Hamilton Kennedy is an Academy Award nominated documentary director, as well as a writer, producer, cameraman, and editor. He is the founder of Black Valley Films, a film production company based in Silver Lake, California.
Evan Jackson Leong is a director and documentary filmmaker. Leong is likely most known for his documentary Linsanity about Jeremy Lin, which made its world premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He has also directed the documentary 1040: Christianity in the New Asia (2010), and the documentary short BLT Genesis (2002), which tracks the behind-the-scenes making of and trajectory of Justin Lin's film, Better Luck Tomorrow.
Vivek Maddala is a four-time Emmy-winning composer who focuses on writing music for feature films, theater and dance productions, and television. He is known for composing music scores for independent movies such as Kaboom, Highway, and the Peabody-winning American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, as well as for silent film restorations for Turner Classic Movies, including a 90-minute score for the Greta Garbo film The Mysterious Lady (2002). Additionally, Maddala writes, produces, and performs as a multi-instrumentalist with various recording artists. He is a Sundance Lab Fellow for film composition, and has had work premiere at the Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, and Sundance film festivals. Maddala has received six Emmy nominations, with four wins, in the category of "Outstanding Music Direction and Composition."
A River Changes Course is a 2013 documentary by Kalyanee Mam. The film explores the damage rapid development has wrought in her native Cambodia on both a human and environmental level. The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2013 and won the Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary. The film also received the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Goodbye World is a 2013 American apocalyptic film directed, co-written and co-produced by Denis Henry Hennelly. It stars Kerry Bishé, Caroline Dhavernas, Adrian Grenier, Gaby Hoffmann, Ben McKenzie, Scott Mescudi and Mark Webber. It follows a group of friends who gather at a compound in the woods north of San Francisco while the world is collapsing all around them.
Grace Lee is an American director and producer. She is known for both her documentaries and narrative films, which often mix in elements of documentaries.
The Grace Lee Project is a 2005 American documentary film directed and co-written by Grace Lee. It is about Lee's attempt to define a common set of stereotypes associated with the name that she shares with the film's subjects.
Sake-Bomb is a 2013 film directed by Junya Sakino, written by Jeff Mizushima, and starring Gaku Hamada and Eugene Kim as cousins who embark on a road trip in California. It is a shared Japanese and American production. It premiered at the 2013 SXSW film festival.
Jewel's Catch One was a dance bar owned by Jewel Thais Williams. It was located at 4067 West Pico Boulevard in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Opened in 1973, it was the longest running black gay dance bar in Los Angeles. After nearly closing in 2015, it was purchased by Mitch Edelson and his father Steve Edelson - who reopened under new management. Briefly called Union after the change in management, it has since reverted to the Catch One moniker.
Hamlet is a 2011 Canadian drama film written and directed by Bruce Ramsay in his directorial debut. It is a condensed retelling of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet set in 1940s England. Ramsay stars alongside Lara Gilchrist, Peter Wingfield, Gillian Barber, and Duncan Fraser. It premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival and was theatrically released in 2014.
Quyen Tran is an Vietnamese-American cinematographer based in Los Angeles. She has worked on multiple Sundance films such as The Little Hours and Deidra & Laney Rob a Train.
Melvonna "Mel" Marie Ballenger was an American director, producer, and writer who created activist short films, known for her involvement in the L.A. Rebellion film movement. She died at the age of 48 from breast cancer.
Scott Kurashige is Professor and Chair of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. He is author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (2008) and The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (2017). With Grace Lee Boggs, he co-authored The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011) and was also a co-author and co-editor of Exiled to Motown: A History of Japanese Americans in Detroit.
