The next film in the Brock University Film Society’s (BUFS) fall lineup, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, offers a heartfelt study of one young man’s devotion to home this Thursday, Sept. 26.
In San Francisco, the childhood house of Jimmie Fails (Jimmie Fails, playing a fictionalized version of himself) has fallen out of his family and into disrepair. He and his best friend, artist and playwright Mont (Jonathan Majors, White Boy Rick, When We Rise), devote themselves to the mansion — complete with its pipe organ, library, and decades’ worth of memories — fixing it up in spite of the unwelcoming elderly white couple who now live there, and in spite of the fact that their minimum-wage jobs can never touch the house’s current market value of $4 million.
“Some movies tell you a story; others invite you into a dream,” said Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post. “Within the life story of one young man trying to rescue his past and claim a right of return, the filmmaker finds an epic history that encompasses postwar migration, the flourishing of the ‘Harlem of the West,’ the Haight Ashbury in the ’60s, redlining, gentrification, environmental racism and the chronic policing of black masculinity.”
The film, a genre-defying collaboration between two debut filmmakers, won a Directing award for Joe Talbot and a Special Jury Award for the creative collaboration between childhood friends Talbot and Fails at Sundance this year.
Tickets for all BUFS shows are available at the Film House in the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre (PAC) on the evening of screenings. General admission is $9.50 or $7 for members, plus tax. Memberships are available through the Film House website.
Visit the BUFS web page for a full list of this season’s selections. A calendar of films coming to the PAC over the next few months is posted on the Film House website. Look for the red B that indicates a BUFS-hosted screening.
For more than 40 years, the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film has hosted the film society (previously known as a series) to bring some of the best in independent, international and Canadian cinema to St. Catharines.
