Homegoings | |
---|---|
Directed by | Christine Turner |
Release date |
|
Country | United States |
Homegoings is a 2013 documentary film directed by Christine Turner about the Owens Funeral Home on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, exploring African-American death rituals through the work of funeral home director Isaiah Owens. The film premiered February 28 at the Museum of Modern Art's 'Documentary Fortnight 2013' showcase, before airing on PBS-TV's POV series and screening for a week at the Maysles Cinema. [1] [2]
A Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker and child of a Chinese-American mother and African-American father, Turner has stated she initially became interested in death rituals after both of her grandmothers died within two weeks of each other. She subsequently contacted Owens—known as "Fix Em" for his ability to repair corpses ravaged by disease, accident or violence—after reading a newspaper article about his work. Filming began in 2009. [1] [3]
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Rory Elizabeth Katherine Kennedy is an American documentary filmmaker who is the eleventh and youngest child of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Kennedy has made documentary films that center on social issues such as addiction, nuclear radiation, the treatment of prisoners-of-war, and the politics of the Mexican border fence. Her films have been featured on many television networks.
Raiford Chatman "Ossie" Davis was an American actor, director, writer, and activist. He was married to Ruby Dee, with whom he frequently performed, until his death. He and his wife were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame; were awarded the National Medal of Arts and were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994.
Charles Burnett is an American film director, film producer, writer, editor, actor, photographer, and cinematographer. His most popular films include Killer of Sheep (1978), My Brother's Wedding (1983), To Sleep with Anger (1990), The Glass Shield (1994), and Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007). He has been involved in other types of motion pictures including shorts, documentaries, and a TV series.
Bill Robinson, nicknamed Bojangles, was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid African-American entertainer in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology. His career began in the age of minstrel shows and moved to vaudeville, Broadway theatre, the recording industry, Hollywood films, radio, and television.
Loretta Mary Aiken, known by her stage name Jackie "Moms" Mabley, was an American stand-up comedian and actress. Mabley began her career on the theater stage in the 1920s and became a veteran entertainer of the Chitlin' Circuit of African-American vaudeville. Mabley later recorded comedy albums and appeared in films and on television programs including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an American art museum devoted to the work of artists of African descent. The Museum’s galleries are currently closed in preparation for a building project that will replace the current building, located at 144 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, with a new one on the same site. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent. Its scope includes exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, educational and public programming, and a permanent collection.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it. Critics consider the film to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, and a thoughtful exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality in America.
Rose Troche is an American film and television director, television producer, and screenwriter.
Ava Marie DuVernay is an American filmmaker, television producer, and film publicist. She won the directing award in the U.S. dramatic competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, becoming the first black woman to win the award. For her work on Selma (2014), DuVernay became the first black woman to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th (2016).
Jeffrey Friedman is an American filmmaker. In 2021, he and Rob Epstein won a Grammy Award for their work on the documentary film Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death, & Technology is an autobiographical documentary film directed by Tiffany Shlain, dedicated to her father. The film unfolds during a year in which technology and science literally become a matter of life and death for the director. As Tiffany's father Dr. Leonard Shlain, MD battles brain cancer and she confronts a high-risk pregnancy, her very understanding of connection is challenged. Using a mix of animation, archival footage, and home movies, Shlain attempts to reveal the ties that link us not only to the people we love but also to the world at large. Connected explores how, after centuries of declaring our independence, it may be time for us to declare our interdependence instead.
Karla Francesca Holloway is an American academic. She is James B. Duke Professor of English & Professor of Law at Duke University, and holds appointments in the Duke University School of Law as well as the university's Department of English, Department of African & African American Studies, and Program in Women's Studies.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker and producer. Her films explore the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. Interpreting the notion of "double consciousness," coined by sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Owusu aims to create a third cinematic space or consciousness. In her work, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces.
New Heritage Theatre Group (NHTG) is the oldest Black nonprofit theater company in New York City, established in 1964. Through its multiple divisions: IMPACT Repertory Theatre, The Roger Furman Reading Series, and New Heritage Films, New Heritage gives training, exposure, and experience to new and emerging artists, playwrights, directors and technicians of color. New Heritage was founded by the late Roger Furman and is currently headed by Executive Producer Voza Rivers and Executive Artistic Director Jamal Joseph. NHTG presentations capture the historical, social, and political experiences of Black and Latino descendants in America and abroad.
A homegoing service is an African-American and Black-Canadian Christian funeral tradition marking the going home of the deceased to the Lord or to heaven. It is a celebration that has become a vibrant part of African American and Black Canadian history and culture. As with other traditions, practices, customs and norms of African American and Black Canadian culture, this ritual for dealing with death was shaped by the African American and Black Canadian experience.
Ky Dickens is a filmmaker, writer and director best known for her documentaries Zero Weeks, Sole Survivor, The City That Sold America and Fish out of Water.
The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is a 2011 American horror short film written and directed by Ari Aster. The film stars Billy Mayo, Brandon Greenhouse, and Angela Bullock as members of a suburban family in which a son extensively abuses his father sexually and emotionally.
Carroll Parrott Blue was an American filmmaker, director and author. Based in Houston, Texas, she was part of the L.A. Rebellion film movement. She was noted for her documentary film and interactive multimedia works, particularly for her project The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing. Blue was a research professor at the University of Houston. She worked to preserve and celebrate the history of the African American community in Houston.
Homegoing is an African-American funeral tradition.