Black Film Festival Comes to Parrish Saturday

The seventh annual East End Black Film Festival is Saturday, bringing five films that explore the African-American experience to the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, which opened its doors for the first time earlier this month.

The festival includes a mix of classic 1960s films and recent movies, both narrative and documentary.

The headlining film is documentary "Hoodwinked," produced by Janks Morton, the award winning producer of "What Black Men Think," which was named the Best Black Documentary of 2007 by the African-American Film Critics Association. Morton will participate in a Q&A with the audience after the screening.

Tickets are $7 per film, or $20 for an all-day pass. The festival runs from 12:30 to 9 p.m. To reserve tickets, call 631-283-5072.

Here are synopses of the five films, courtesy of the festival:

RAISING IZZIE (2012) Gertie and Izzie are two young girls on their own. Abandoned by their father and orphaned by their mother, they are doing the best they can to stay in school and remain undetected so they can stay together. With assistance from their mother before her passing, the girls are financially prepared to sustain themselves for some time. Gertie, 14, takes seriously her charge to raise her younger sister Izzie, 10, alone. Greg and Tonya is a couple whose love for one another radiates. Their attempts to build a family have been unsuccessful. Tonya longs to share the love and nurturing she puts into her job as a teacher with children of her own. Is it God’s will that they remain childless? (Directed by Roger M. Bobb. With Rockmond Dunbar, Vanessa Williams, Han Soto, and Victoria Staley. Writer David Martyn Conley)

PURLIE VICTORIOUS (1963) When Ossie Davis’s “Purlie Victorious” premiered on Broadway in 1961, America’s Civil Rights movement was gearing up for a tumultuous decade. This film version of the play follows the dogged efforts of a black preacher (Ossie Davis) and the young girl (Ruby Dee) who fancies him to swindle an inheritance from the plantation owner he once served (Sorrell Booke, of “The Dukes of Hazzard”) Alan Alda co-stars in his first film role. 

THE LAST/FIRST KISS (2011) Two 20-something strangers accidentally encounter one another in a park and forge an unexpected connection. Following which a spontaneous but yet short lived romance develops between the two. Directed by Brooklyn born Andrea Ashton.

THE LEARNING TREE (1969) This dramatic film tells the story of a young African-American growing up in rural Kansas during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when racial discrimination was a social norm and legally sanctioned in parts of the United States. Written and directed by Gordon Parks, the film is based upon his 1964 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. It is the first Hollywood studio film to be directed by an African American. In 1989, The Learning Tree was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

HOODWINKED (2012) - The film examines the institutional forces that shape perceptions of black males and affect how they regard themselves. Documentarian Janks Morton has a simple message when it comes to statistics that portray African-Americans in a negative light: Go to the source and fact-check the figures for yourself. It’s probably one of the rare, if not the only cinematic experience where you will see an array of real life Black scholars-including Boyce Watkins, finance professor at Syracuse University, Marc Lamont Hill, an education professor at Columbia University and Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University-opining on statistics and stereotypes and their impact on the souls of Black folk, particularly the young.
Produced by Janks Morton, "Hoodwinked" is a sequel to his 2007 award-winning documentary "What Black Men Think."