Carmen and Geoffrey
Black History Month 2024
•
1h 18m
Directed by Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob • Documentary • With Carmen de Lavallade, Geoffrey Holder, Ailvin Ailey, Lester Horton, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker • 2006 • 80 minutes
Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, two living legends in the world of American dance, are the subjects of this intimate and revealing documentary. Carmen achieved notoriety in the early 1950s, as a lead dancer of incomparable beauty and grace with Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater. Geoffrey, large in life and an elemental force on stage, found fame not only as a dancer but also as an actor (Live and Let Die), soda spokesman (“the Un-Colaaaaa...”) and theater director (The Wiz). He and Carmen met in 1954 and married a year later.
Filmed over several years in the United States, Trinidad and Paris, this exquisite documentary features candid interviews and glorious dance performances, with legends like Alvin Ailey, Herbert Ross, Lester Horton, Joe Layton, Duke Ellington and Josephine Baker, demonstrating the amazing talent and uninterrupted creativity of these icons of dance.
Up Next in Black History Month 2024
-
My Brother's Wedding
Directed by Charles Burnett • Drama • With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell • 1983 • 86 minutes
In 1983, after many long months of shooting, Charles Burnett sent his rough-cut of My Brother’s Wedding to his producers. Ignoring his request to finish the editing of t...
-
Bronx Gothic (Okwui Okpokwasili)
Directed by Andrew Rossi • Documentary • With Okwui Okpokwasili • 2017 • 91 minutes
From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, The First Monday in May) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show, Bronx Gothic. R...
-
Black Is the Color: A History of Afri...
Directed by Jacques Goldstein • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a major exhibit called “Harlem On My Mind.” There was just one thing wrong: the show had no work by African-American artists.
The “Harlem on My Mind” fiasco is emblematic ...