The
Black Cinema House in
Chicago, which has quickly established itself during the past year as one of the best venues in the country to regularly watch independent, experimental and
rarely seen black films, will continue its summer screening programs with a
showing of Charles Burnett’s groundbreaking and influential classic film "Killer of Sheep."
Dealing with life in the Watts area of South Central
Los Angeles in the mid-1970’s, the film’s story is told from the point of
view of Stan, a sensitive and troubled
man who is growing detached and numb from his family and the world around him, due to the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse.
As it been said about the film, “it merely presents life —
sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle
humor."
Remarkably, the film was made over a series of weekends on
a budget of less than $10,000, and finally completed in 1977. It was screened occasionally at film festivals, as its reputation grew, until the
film won a major prize at the 1981
Berlin International Film Festival.
Since then, the Library
of Congress declared it, in 1990, as a national treasure, and one of the first
fifty on the National Film Registry
and the National Society of Film Critics
selected it as one of the “100 Essential
Films” of all time.
It was restored in 2007 and released theatrically in movie theaters in the U.S. for the
first time.
The film will be screened and presented by Vaun Monroe, screenwriter and an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago, this Sunday, July 6 at 4PM, at the Black
Cinema House’s new location, at 72nd
As always the screening is FREE but you must RSVP here
