With race looming over the 2008 presidential election, it's no surprise that it is too the focus of trine new documentaries.
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Although the filmmakers behind the Hurricane Katrina documentary "Trouble the Water" put out to examine how race played a role in unitary of the country's biggest disasters, the directors of "The Order of Myths" and "Moving Midway" say race emerged as a major motif while they were motion-picture photography. All three directors look at race through the prism of three Southern cities only say the issues resonate throughout America.
"I think race is the great mute in our country," aforementioned "Myths" music director Margaret Brown. "And the movie is a way to set out a conversation. It's an opening."
Brown to begin with planned to make a narrative photographic film about American Mardi Gras, which originated in her hometown of Mobile, Ala., 15 days before New Orleans became a city. But as she began researching the film, Brown realized she had a better documentary.
Brown's documentary, which opened in Los Angeles last week and New York utmost month, explores the hallowed traditions and elusive forces that have kept Mobile's Mardi Gras celebrations shared along colouration lines -- complete with separate carnivals, balls and kings and queens -- since its inception.
But, spell filming, she discovered a connection between the e. B. White and smuggled carnival queens. One of the dim queen's ancestors was on the last slave ship brought to the United States by the egg white queen's ancestors.
"The cinematographer and I looked at each other and said, 'We have a film,'" said Brown, who is white.
Realizing how much race would be a focus, Brown began to vex about how the people in Mobile would respond to her film. Two weeks agone, it was screened in her hometown before a sold-out integrated crowd of 1,800. Some old blacks in the audience had not set foot in the city's fine art deco theater since it was integrated in 1967.
The film received a standing ovation and, every day since the screening, in that location have been comments just about the film in the city's newspaper.
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