Burngreave New Deal for Communities

Throughout Black History Month, a number of films are being shown in and around Burngreave with the theme of black history and culture.

All film showings are £2.00 entry for adults and 0.50p for children under 16 years, young children under 5 years are free. For more information please contact one of the team on 279 6920 or 292 0393

Dir: Menelik Shabazz, Dur: 101min, Cert: 15. Financially independent London girl Pat (McFarlane) looks forward to a comfortable married life until she meets the charming Del, who quickly moves in then loses his job, causing them to challenge their assumptions about each other. The first British film to give a central voice to a black woman.

Dir: Kolton Lee, Dur: 88 min, Cert: 15. ‘Cherps is a fitting “Alfie” for these times …. It represents a lively new spin for Black British cinema..’ (Variety) Reggie (Clint Dyer) is the quintessential black British geezer: a man that loves to ‘cherps’. But when one man had too many women, he had seven days to make a choice. To cherps or not to cherps? A riotous comedy about life, love and happiness. Cherps stars Clint Dyer, Kaye Bridgeman, Felix Dexter and Martin Offiah.

Dir: Sandra Krampelhuber, Dur: 74 min, Cert: 12A. For the first time the feature length documentary film Queens of Sound– A History of Reggae and Dancehall explores the long neglected female side of Reggae and Dancehall music in Jamaica. Three generations of women in the Jamaican music business tell us about their role in past and present, their first steps into the career, their struggle for acceptance in a male-dominated business, their life paths and big success. World-famous musicians such as Marcia Griffiths, Tanya Stephens, Sasha, Cecile, Chevelle Franklyn, Queen Ifrica, Macka Diamond and Lady G – just to name a few, as well as women behind the scenes, f.e. Dr. Carolyn Cooper (University of the West Indies), Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah (Rastafari activist, film-maker, author, journalist, broadcaster), Nordia Rose (hottest music video director in Jamaica), Jade Lee (artist management) or Sandra Joy Alcott (founder of JAFA – Jamaica Association of Female Artists), give us an understanding of Jamaica’s music scene from a female point of view. The documentary highlights via in-depth interviews and spectacular performances the social, economic, religious, textual and individual aspects of Reggae and Dancehall culture.

Dir: Ishmahil, Dur: 98 min, Cert: 15. Cuba embraced tourism in the early 90’s as a means of surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Island has begun to witness many changes, which now threaten the integrity of the revolution: racial discrimination, prostitution, consumerism and the re-emergence of class divisions. Hasta Siempre examines the results of the Cuban revolution from a Cuban Perspective and asks the question: Can the revolution survive after the death of Fidel Castro?

Dir: David Okuefuna, Dur: 60 min, Cert: PG. This unique film uncovers the torture and murder of Black Germans in the Third Reich through a profoundly distressing experience in Nazi concentration camps. Piecing together experiences of the survivors and the descendants of victims, together with never seen before archive materials, Moise's film documents a moving, if brutal, tale of medical experiments involving sterilisation, torture and gruesome death in the concentration camps.

Until recently, few would have even believed that Blacks and mixed-race people lived in Hitler's Germany let alone underwent the horrors which some, luckily, survived to tell in the film. It is a revelation that shattered the conspiratorial silence of the German authorities.

The film has been shown in more than twenty countries and won four international awards including the 1997 New York Festivals Unesco Award.

Winner of the Best Documentary Award, Pan-African Film Festival 2005, Dir: Owen ‘Alik Shahadah, Dur: 108 min, Cert: PG. Crime, drugs, HIV/Aids, poor education, inferiority complex, low expectation, poverty, corruption, poor health and under development plagues people of African decent globally – Why? 500 Years Later from the onset of slavery and subsequent colonialism Africans are still struggling for basic freedom. Why? Filmed in five continents, and over twenty countries, 500 Years Later engages the authentic, retrospective voice, told from the African vantage point of whom history has sought to silence by examining the collective atrocities that uprooted Africans from their culture and homeland. Film stars Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, Maulana Karenga, Paul Robeson Jr. and Dr. Hakim Adi

Dir: Stephen Lloyd Jackson, Dur: 93 min, Cert: 15. This is a powerful drama about corruption, betrayal and greed. Set against a backdrop of urban gangsters and political corruption in the inner city streets of London. A crooked politician battles it out with a ‘Yardie’ underworld enforcer in a web of drugs, sex and violence where everyone wants to be a Ruler.

Dir: Moise Shewa, Dur: 62 min, Cert: PG. The film Soul to Soul captured one of the most important cultural moments in the history of Black America and Africa. In 1971, America's top soul music performers – including Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, Mavis Staples, Roberta Flack and Carlos Santana – journeyed to take part in Ghana's 14th Anniversary of Independence celebrations. All young and curious about Africa, nothing could have prepared them for what lay in store: the food, the slave forts, the heat, lizards and tropical storms. What started off as the Black Woodstock became a pilgrimage for these stars to find their musical and ancestral roots – “a coming together after years of separation”. The week-long celebrations climaxed with an historic, 15-hour, all-night concert where over 200,000 Ghanaians went wild in Accra's packed Black Star Square as Pickett, Ike and Tina's super-powered performances set the stage on fire alongside the best in African talent. Thirty years on, Ike Turner, Wilson Pickett and some of the key people who made the trip describe vividly what it was really like to touch African soil for the first time. With contributions from Maya Angelou and Nelson George, the film also explores what became of the Back to Africa movement embraced by African-Americans in the 1960s and 70s.