Brother Blue: Boston Griot

brother blue: boston's griot from joshua bee alafia on Vimeo.

Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill aka "Brother Blue" was one of the great American storytellers. I grew up watching him perform in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Brattle Square, at Cafe's, the Children's Museum etc. I loved listening to his colorful and often transcendental stories, and I credit him as being one of my chief inspirations to make films. Here is a short clip of the footage from the documentary I started last year. Brother Blue passed over in his sleep November 3rd, 2009. He was 88 years old. I hope to finish the documentary in his honor by the time we have his memorial in the Spring of 2010. His wife Ruth Edmond Hill was his rock of reason, and the librarian that captured his heart and gave him the support needed to be his freeflowing creative whirlwind self.

Guz: Portrait of a Baller as a Young Man

Guz: Portrait of a Baller as a Young Man from joshua bee alafia on Vimeo.

The Reelworks filmmaker mentorship program approached me with a special project a few months ago. They wanted to do a portrait of a young father to be who was aging out of the Fostercare system named Chris Guzman as part of a series of joint collaborations with Youth Communications. Chris writes for Represent Magazine, and impressed the editors of the magazine with his man up attitude in being dedicated to being a good father, even as he was going through a break up with his pregnant girlfriend. I ended up spending several days with Guz, shooting him in his environment, interviewing his homies, and going up to the Bronx to shoot him in his first apartment, his first experience of being on his own after many years of group homes. He told me about his dreams of playing in the NBA and I've recently shot him meeting up and playing some hoop with Jaime Peterson, a professional basketball player who plays for Grupo Begar Leon in Spain. That will be part two of the video above.
Funny how the gig came in synchonicity to where a lot of my energy is directed these days, from The Seed to Let's Stay Together, I've been really thematically drawn to envisioning the strong family unit, celebrating parenthood as we currently are in a real crisis when it comes to bringing up the youth in safe, nurturning environments. The youth have been abandoned by society on a planetary scale... but we can still step up and invest energy into their blossoming potential.

The Seed is coming to DC

Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago last week and Boston the previous week have been great screenings. Chuck D of Public Enemy came out and supported at the Roxbury Film Fest.
I've been screening the Seed as a work in progress because it has to be a premiere when it hits the larger film festivals that have a large film market. If you're in the Washington DC area, please come out and support. We're raising funds to take the film to Ethiopia this Fall so we can really start raising funds for the homeless youth of Addis Abeba.
Screening as follows:









Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 7pm
Sankofa Cafe
2714 Georgia Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20001
202 234 4755

Friday August 21, 2009 at 7pm

Jamaica Jamaica

348 Victory Drive

Herndon, VA 20170

Call : 703-481-8641

Sunday August 23rd at 8pm

Busboys and Poets@ 14th and V

2021 14th st NW
Washington, DC 20009
(202) 387-7638 -

Hope to see y'all! I'll be there for Q n A following each screening and selling DVDs of Cubamor.

BLK JKS... the sound of our time.

blk jks july 5 rebel soul at weeksville from joshua bee alafia on Vimeo.

South Africa's luminous band BLK JKS plays Bed Stuy's rootsy music festival Rebel Soul at Weeksville on July 5th, 2009. On July 4, 1827, New York state declared emancipation from slavery for Africans. Unable to celebrate openly on Independence Day due to threats of violence, the black community honored newly won freedom publicly July 5. So the day was one of liberation in commemoration of our Independence with BLK JKS offering liberted sounds that conjured the Ancestral Spirits of Jimi Hendrix, Fela Kuti and King Tubby and framing them within traditional South African and Zulu sensibilities. It was a day that the Brooklyn Renaissance was honored by our South African bredren in the sunshine of Brooklyn with grass beneath our feet.
The first time i saw them was at the New Africa Live series that Rwandan songstress Somi hosts a year ago. I ended up shooting them as they recorded at Electric Lady Studios, Jimi Hendrix's epic studio that has continued to be the recording studio of choice to folks like D'Angelo, Common, Pharrell, Erykah Badu, and on and on... I talked to Knox, their manager and we agreed this had to be documented for many reasons. I was leaving for Kenya the next day so I spent just one day shooting them lay down their Mystery EP with Brandon Curtis of Secret Machines at the mixing board. One of my favorite moments was sitting at Jimi's pianos.. he has a black one and a white one facing eachother, mini grands... his Spirit is still there... strong... you can definitely hear it in the funk that comes out of there. So down the line, be on the lookout for a doc project that i hope to finish shooting with BLK JKS in september, when they come back to town.

Old Soul

Old Soul

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Havana Habibi is shot... now have to cut it.

havana habibi preview

I got back from Havana January 16th, and despite the fact that my tripod hadn't made it on my flight and I had missed my flight two days earlier because I lost my passport... I felt HIGH. High because the journey that is Havana Habibi was coming into it's last trimester... the documentary is shot!

Change is Gonna Come: Obama Inauguration

Kenyatta Hill (son of the late great lead singer for Culture, Joseph Hill) rocks the mic real hard in Georgetown after the Inauguration.

January 20, 2009
I had just come back from a government sanctioned trip to Havana on a professional researcher visa to finish photography for Havana Habibi. It was was snowing in New York, I was beat, but I knew I had to go to DC and follow up to the Brooklyn Obama little mini doc I did. I drove down with my sista Regine Romain and her daughter Ngozi and dropped them off in Silver Springs where I connected with my bredren Tikher Teferra, who was my assistant director/sound man for The Seed, the feature film I shot in Ethiopia. He'd moved from Addis Abeba to the states in 2008 and now works for a video production house in Silver Springs. We ate bomb Ethiopian food and went tried to go to bed early, knowing we'd have to wake up at 4am to get an early start on Obama's Inauguration. There was such hype over the whole thing, traffic alerts, folks making it seem like it would be impossible to get there from new york... We got up well before dawn and hopped on the train, which was packed to capacity and rode in. The vibe was jubulant, somewhat quiet, but electric on the train. I was struck by how many children were coming out, as well as how strong the turnout was considering how freezing it was... it was hurt you cold... mean to you kind of cold. We were unable to get to the train stop we wanted to because of the crowds, so we walked a little farther to the festivities. Volunteers were out in mass to help direct folks, but I think some were from other cities, because they we got some opposing dirctions. Our press passes came from an on-line hip hop magazine, and turned out to be disfunctional when it came to getting to the press area, so we did plan B, and just talked to folks about why they made the journey and what kind of expectations they had for the future. That night was full of celebration, the hustlers came out and sold everything from Obama hot sauce, condoms, watches to Obama air fresheners, cups, plates, and thongs. We breezed through a party that i was very underdressed for and ended up going to Georgetown to see Kenyatta Hill perform in a little Reggae club.
Enjoy the video!

FESPACO: African Cannes 2009

Burkina Faso Roots!
I landed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, I was struck by the heat, and the overwhelming feeling that I had just stepped into another chapter of the life journeys. It was my first time on continental West Africa, before that I had shot a documentary in Cape Verde. There were sistas in dresses that had "FESPACO" written on them, holding signs and I met up with them and they pointed me in the direction of a van to the hotel. I was so hyped to finally be in the land that was once home to one of the world's greatest leaders, Thomas Sankara. FESPACO had taken care of everything, plane ticket, meals, and room at Hotel L'Indipendance, which is really the epicenter of the networking at the festival. We arrived at the hotel and I started struggling with French. There was no filmmaker reception really, it was pretty much find your own way through the bussle. The room was nice, took a shower, then went out to the National Plaza with Walter Powell, director of "After School," to see some local music and then to a spot called Kingston to peep some roots reggae. The next day i spent hours getting my filmmaker badge done, which was a mission... much waiting in line, being told i needed to bring get a photo taken downtown if i hadn't brought a passport photo...etc... finally a brotha took a photo of my on his laptop camera and it was done. The whole process took about five hours. When i wasn't in line, i sat and asked folks words in Moore, because it just felt strange to speak French in Thomas Sankara's country... he was so much a liberator and burned fire on the colonial mindset. The next day i hooked up with Leslie To, a Burkinabe filmmaker i had met in New York, at a screening of her short film. Afterwards i met her father and uncle as she took me to "Ouagadougou's 42nd street, Kwame Nkrumah Boulevard. The following days were really a blur. I was not really prepared, didn't have flyers or images to make a real flyer with. My film, "The Seed," had been nominated for the Paul Robeson Award in the Diaspora Film Competition, so i was really trying to get folks to come out, writing the information of the screening on the back of little business cards and handing them out. It seemed like a lot of the filmmakers bond link up on language, it was hard to reach out to a lot of the French speaking African Filmmakers, who seemed deeply engrossed in conversations most of the time in French. I did build with some Brasilian Filmmakers who where brought out for a Brasilian cinema show, like Carmen Luz. American Filmmakers Patrick Coleman and Kirk Shannon-Butts showed their films, "Patterns of Passion," and "Blue Print."
My film didn't win, but our screening was a success. Folks came out and enjoyed it. Some of the hightlights for me were seeing Magic System rock the house in the national plaza, all the great food, rolling around on scooters with my brotha Alli and seeing his family and community garden, taking photos in a red millet beer bar, and meeting all the characters that came out. I did a few interviews and hopefully will get some buzz out for the film and have more opportunities to screen. I also met some folks who know Ben Okri, one of my all time favorite writers and the man responsible for the Famished Road trilogy, which i hope to someday adapt to film.
Ethiopia represented hard with Haile Gerima's Teza winning the festival. His sister was there to accept the award on his behalf and in her accpetance speech, she said that she hopes to see a united Africa with one flag and one language... the exact response i had dreamed a few nights earlier when i dreamed i had won the Paul Robeson award. I guess it would have been too much Ethiopian invasion if i took the diaspora with The Seed being shot in Addis Abeba... there's always next time.

On the Road to FESPACO

I remember hearing about FESPACO, the largest African Film Festival and African Film Market, when I was in college and was cutting my first 16mm film, Crossing Holy Waters, on Taale Rosselini's Steinbeck flatbed because the ones at school were overbooked. He had worked in Burkina Faso in the Peace Corps, and had made several beautiful films out there. He had an award from FESPACO that was a bronze baobab tree, and right away, I decided I would have to be in the festival in the near future. Well, it's taken me 16 years, but it's going down. I submitted my Ethiopian Film, The Seed, as a work in progress and got the invitation to the festival a month ago, complete with airfare and expenses taken care of. Because of a technical problem with my film (for your filmmakers, I shot with a Panasonic AG-HVX200 in 24pn mode mini dv, and digitized it at 24 frames a second instead of using the 3:2 2:3 pulldown) I had to recut my film, using my old edit as a map, but eyeballing each shot to match the previous selection. I moved into my editing studio in Dumbo and grinded 18 hour days for the last ten days straight, with the crecendo of pulling in mi bredren Hisham Haj Omar to come out and iron out the last minutiae as we convert the film to PAL for the festival.
The process has had me thinking a lot about the journey this film took me on. It started in 2007. I went to Ethiopia to do a documentary on the Revolution of 1974 as research to enable me to write a script on the subject told from a beaurocrat's 11 year old daugher, a lion in the palace, a student activist in the Ethiopian Student Movement, a repatriated Rasta from Jamaica living in Shashemene, and a guard assigned to watch Emporer Haile Sellassie I during his house arrest. I was spending a lot of time at Addis Abeba University interviewing professors who were instrumental in the Ethiopian Student movement and stumbled on the story of priests in Axum who had deciphered heirogliphics that prophecized that the oncoming millennium would be the beginning of a golden age, a renaissance where the oppressive and destructive forces on earth will be destroyed. I wanted to go to Axum and interview them, but was low on funds. Seeing all the homeless youth in the streets made me want to make a film that could benefit them by establishing a foundation to help get them off the streets and into boarding schools. One day I looked into the eyes of a little boy selling napkins, and I saw a sage looking back at me... and that was the birth of idea for The Seed.
So here I am, been awake for he last 27 hours and the film is in the final process of PAL conversion from NTSC. I will update with stories from Burkina Faso as it all goes down.
perfectlove
jbee