In 2021, almost a decade after moving from Towson to California to pursue a career in acting, Michael Strassner was steadily working, but not quite crushing it. He joined The Groundlings, the famous Los Angeles improv troupe, and had some success there. He came this close to being on Saturday Night Live—callbacks and everything. He got small parts in major TV sitcoms (he played Nick Offerman’s brother in Parks and Recreation). But he hadn’t really had his big break.

That is, until the writer-director-actor Jay Duplass (one half of the acclaimed Duplass brothers) followed him on Instagram. Strassner seized the day and sent him a DM. The two met, got along famously, and decided to make a film together.

The result is The Baltimorons, an underdog romcom about the relationship between Cliff (Strassner), a newly sober 30-something improv actor loosely based on Strassner, and Didi (Liz Larsen), a middle-aged dentist. (Read my full review, here.)

The film, which is entirely set in Baltimore, was a huge sensation at SXSW and will soon be playing in the town that inspired it. The sold-out Maryland premiere, featuring a Q&A with Strassner and Larsen, will take place at The Senator on Sept. 10, with more showtimes at The Charles and other local theaters to follow.

Ahead of the local premiere, we caught up with Strassner to discuss his love of comedy, how the film came to be, and giving Baltimore the star treatment it deserves.

Tell me about your background. Where did you go to school—which, since you’re from Baltimore, you know means high school.
I know, indeed. I’ll do the whole pipeline. I went to Hunt’s [Church] originally, then Riderwood, then Immaculate Heart of Mary for middle school, and Loyola Blakefield for high school.

How did you get into performance?
I kinda got my first itch for theater at Immaculate Heart. I got to be Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Hugo in Bye Bye Birdie, even though I wanted to play Conrad. And then off to Loyola—I did a little bit of sports there, but I just always loved doing theater. I was part of the Blakefield Players. I went to East Carolina University for a year and then I transferred to University of Maryland. I was originally a business major and then I realized, this is not what I want to do. I want to be an actor. And so I changed to theater. And by February of 2012 I was out to L.A.

I had assumed your background was improv and comedy. But your background was acting.
Right after college, I went to L.A., and that’s when I started doing improv and sketch comedy. Before that it was all theater and plays. If I’d done my research a little better, I would’ve realized that my heroes came from the Chicago scene: Bill Murray, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, John Belushi. They were all Second City people. But I was in L.A. and I was like, well, who else do I love? Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig and Phil Hartman. Well, I guess I’ll do The Groundlings.

While you were at The Groundlings, you got an opportunity to audition for SNL.
A rite of passage, truly. It was 2016 or 2017 and I tested with my friend, Heidi Gardner, who ended up getting it, of course. We did a showcase in L.A., then they brought three of us out to New York and then back to L.A., and then we came back for our final test in New York. It was very surreal. Lorne Michaels was there eating popcorn. They say it’s a rough room, but I did get some laughs, so I felt good about that. And I was like, “Okay, this is it!” And then it wasn’t.

Is there a feeling not getting SNL might’ve been a blessing in disguise?
One hundred percent. I was not sober at the time and I feel like if had gone there while I was still in active addiction, I never would have survived. I would’ve ended up like one of my heroes.

You started getting some small roles on major sitcoms. And then what?
In 2021, two things happened: I saw that Jay Duplass followed me on Instagram, and I had a short film that I wrote and I was hoping to find an actress for it. And I thought, “I’ve heard this guy helps out people. Let me send him my script in a DM.” …Six months later Jay replied. He wrote, “I’m super old. I don’t know how Instagram works, but send me your script.” And then he said, “Come over to my house.” And I was like, “I’m a stranger on the internet! You’re a celebrity. Why are you giving me your address!” [Laughs] And we had lunch.

You later made the short and sent him a copy, which he liked.
Yeah, he took time out of his day. And this is the kind of stuff that doesn’t happen in L.A. At least it doesn’t happen for me. It’s really a testament to Jay and Mark at Duplass [Brothers Productions]. They really want to help the next batch of independent filmmakers.

Over time, you told Jay your story, including your sobriety journey, and one day he said, “Let’s make a movie.”
Yeah, he said, “Hey man, I really want to turn your life into a movie. You want to do it?” And I was like, “Yes, please.”

You guys wrote The Baltimorons together. Was the plan always for you to play Cliff?
When we were writing it, I asked Jay, am I gonna act in it? And he was like, yeah man, you’re going to be the star.

This is a cliché, but it really did feel like Baltimore was a character in the movie. Was that intentional?
Yeah. I mean, we really wanted to make it a true love letter to Baltimore. I just love this city so much. I tried to have these authentic Baltimore things throughout. Natty Boh was super nice that they gave permission to use their stuff, and Berger Cookies. And the city is filled with so many people who are willing to help. I had so many extras who were my family and friends. People just took time out to help and it was the most beautiful thing. Places like Rocket to Venus and Dylan’s [Oyster Cellar]. We were like, “Can we use these locations?” And they were like, “Of course!”

I feel like Baltimore doesn’t always get this treatment. It’s usually Chicago and Boston and New York that are mythologized like this.
I grew up watching John Waters. I grew up watching Barry Levinson. I think what David Simon has done is great, but it never really shows the city in the best light. I feel like this city has so much more beauty and that it’s time we show it again. And we have our, like, Woody Allen Manhattan shot of the Key Bridge, which is my favorite shot, truly the most beautiful shot of the movie. We got that two months before it fell. It’s such an honor to have that in there. And 34th Street [also featured in the film] is a place that I grew up loving as a kid. I’m a Christmas nut, so the fact that we were able to, just like, shoot on 34th Street was like the coolest thing in the world.

So, speaking of John, has he seen the film yet?
He has. He came to the Provincetown screening and that was really cool. He sat in the back row, and he even stayed for the Q&A and was super sweet and kind. And he asked a question. He said, “How did you get to shoot on 34th Street? I’ve wanted to shoot there for forever!”

You have amazing chemistry with your co-star Liz Larsen.
It was immediate. We just kind of fell in love with each other in a platonic way, which was a blessing because if she and I aren’t vibing the movie [fails].

Tell me about the SXSW screenings. Your whole family and lots of friends, many of whom were in the movie, came.
My dad and step mom came to one screening and my dad is just going throughout the whole entire movie saying, “Oh, there’s Alison, there’s Lauren, there’s Dell, there’s Marty.” And I’m like, Dad, it’s not a private screening. You can’t just be saying everybody’s name you’re seeing in the movie!

Let’s talk about the title, Baltimorons. That’s kind of an inside joke for locals. Are you concerned some might take it the wrong way?Well, that’s the name of Cliff’s sketch group [in the film]. But if I didn’t come from Baltimore, I wouldn’t be caught dead naming the film that.

Coming home to shoot this film must’ve been quite a heady experience for you.
I mean, the best thing that’s ever happened to me is my sobriety. But number two is shooting this movie in Baltimore. You know, the fact that I got to come home to make my first movie as a lead, it was truly an honor. We would leave the set sometimes at 5 a.m. and I just remember driving past M&T Bank Stadium as the sun was coming up, and I’m like, this is my dream. It doesn’t get better than this.

Read my full review of The Baltimorons, here. 

“Authenticity is in the tiniest of details,” says makeup artist Debi Young. “I’d just done Watchman with Jean Smart, where she had played a sharply dressed FBI special agent. And now for Mare of Easttown [the acclaimed HBO series], I wanted to do broken capillaries on her face and give her a little rosacea. And she’s like, ‘Can you give me dishpan hands?’ She had to become this Pennsylvania grandma.”

“If her character went to a party or an event, she had to look like she did her own makeup,” continues Young, with a smile from her Owings Mills home. (She’s seated, in the photo above, next to her daughter-in-law, who is also a makeup artist.) She’s clearly pleased the elegant Emmy-winning actress was almost unrecognizable from role to role. “Not the same person, right?”

Young, herself a four-time Emmy nominee and NAACP Image Award-winning makeup artist and makeup department head, recently wrapped a forthcoming musical co-produced by Pharrell Williams. She has worked on films and television series, including Shirley, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, Jackie, True Detective, Treme, and The Wire.

She got her start, of all places, in the Baltimore Police Department—between shifts fielding emergency calls. On break in the ladies’ room, Young, whose positive vibes exude from every pore, did her colleagues’ makeup and noticed they felt better about themselves afterward. (Actor Wendell Pierce, who she worked with on The Wire and Treme, called her his “therapist” in one interview and said sitting in Young’s makeup chair “brings a calm to your day.”)

The BPD ladies’ room sessions gave her sense of gratification and after her second son was born, she withdrew her pension contributions and quit to pursue an aesthetician’s license. A client who hosted a local television show asked Young to do her makeup in exchange for a screen credit, and soon she was on the set of NBC’s hit, Homicide: Life on the Street.

Of course, the author of the book that led to the TV series turned up during filming. Young recognized David Simon as the same reporter who used to come into her BPD communications department, looking for police reports. “It’s crazy how things overlap,” she says.

It is not the only part of Young’s life and career that overlaps. Years later, she met Ngozi Olandu Young—her future daughter-in-law but then a Morgan State student—working behind the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom in Towson Town Center. Impressed with her patience and attention to detail, she mentored and eventually hired her as an assistant on The Wire, throwing her into the deep end.

“My first episode? ‘Hamsterdam.’ Where I had to do 183 extras and make them look down and out while they’re buying and using drugs and everything,” Olandu Young recalls. “I was on Google trying to research what drug addicts look like. I talked to my dad, a psychiatrist who helped people with drug and alcohol abuse issues.”

Olandu has gone on to her own Emmy-nominated career and, among major TV and film efforts, just wrapped Spike Lee’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low.

While working on The Wire and other projects, Young has become something of an expert on blood—its coagulation, hues, and the various color stains it leaves, depending on circumstance. Same with dirt. “Dirt and mud from different parts of the country have their own textures and colors and you have to get that right,” she says. However, the artistry, which also includes using prosthetics, is about creating characters.

“If you are a sweaty drunk, you’re going to be a sweaty drunk when you get up out of my chair,” Young says. “I have my idea of what a character should look like as I read the script, making my notes. I also know the cast is arriving with that character in them already and I need to hear how they see themselves. I take what they say, how I see it, and what the vision is of the writer or the director and try to make it a collaborative effort.”

While growing up, Young’s father had a barbershop on Edmonson Avenue. The Harlem Theater was around the corner and her mom, a nursing assistant, worked weekends. So on Saturdays, her father would drop Young and her siblings off at the cinema while he cut hair.

“We would watch two or three movies and come back [to the barbershop]. I was always pouring his tonics and lotions in my hand, practicing on people, just as I was playing with my mother’s makeup on her vanity,” Young recalls. “I still remember when I was nine or 10, he said to me, ‘Your name is going be on credits like that,’ pointing to the television. I said, ‘What are credits?’ And he told me those are the names of all the people who worked on the movie to make the movie.”

On a cold weeknight in February, a small stream of people walk under the marquee of The Charles Theatre in Station North, queuing to watch a 29-year-old Jim Jarmusch film. Once inside, moviegoers buy popcorn at a retro metalwork concessions stand and mill around between cherry-red metal chairs and cafe tables set out on the concrete floor. Exposed brick walls run down both sides of the lobby to the five screening rooms, the walls hung with movie posters. A vintage Super Simplex 35-millimeter film projector, circa the 1920s, stands at the end of the hallway, a reminder of the theater’s long history.

And what a history it is. The Charles Theatre, then called The Times, opened as an all-newsreel theater in 1939, the same year The Senator Theatre opened just four miles north in Govans. That the two theaters, now the oldest movie theaters in Baltimore, are still open and screening films is thanks to the creativity and perseverance of one local family.

Over the years, James “Buzz” Cusack, his nephew John Sandiford, Cusack’s daughter, Kathleen Cusack Lyon, and her husband, Chris Lyon, reclaimed both theaters when each closed, rebuilding and reopening them, then reopening them again after the pandemic and then after subsequent entertainment-business strikes threatened to keep them shuttered.

In so doing, they’ve kept more than just marquee lights on in Baltimore—they’ve kept Baltimoreans watching movies on the big screen, sitting in darkened auditoriums in the kind of camaraderie that’s born from a collective love of cinema.

The two theaters show much more than old art films. The Senator tends to screen bigger-budget movies, while The Charles skews toward independent films. Both theaters have revival programs, showing older or recently remastered films every week, and The Charles offers a Cinema Sundays Club, a long-running, membership-driven film club.

All this, as well as daily showings is done by members of the family, plus a small staff of folks who help manage the theaters, sell and take tickets, pour sodas, and scoop out requisite bags of popcorn.

On that February night, the auditorium showing Jarmusch’s Dead Man was half-full, not a bad crowd for a late Thursday night and a 1995 movie. Many of those in the seats seemed to know each other, something that Sandiford, who runs the revival series, says is common.

Above the darkened theater, The Charles’ oldest projection room, unmanned since the 2013 digitalization of film, is a tiny ad-hoc museum. Old photos, news clips, movie posters, and memorabilia are pinned or duct-taped to the sage-green walls, covering them in a wild collage, like a police evidence board. A poster for Pink Flamingos is stuck to an old metal storage cabinet with fraying masking tape, Divine pointing her gun directly at the digital projector, her red dress frozen in time.

“I hope people in Baltimore realize how rare it is to have not just one but two indie theaters like that,” says Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer in Johns Hopkins’ film and media studies department, of the importance, especially in the wake of the pandemic, of having both The Charles and The Senator still in business.

“I can’t stress enough how different it is to see a film on the big screen,” continues DeLibero, who has lived in Baltimore for decades and seen hundreds of films across both screens. “You cannot replicate it even on a big-screen TV. It’s the actual visual experience, and the aural experience of seeing a film the way the filmmakers intended it to be seen.”

DeLibero underscores the incredible value of being able to see such wildly different films as Top Gun Maverick and Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, which both screened post-pandemic at The Charles, as well as taking her film students—many of whom had never seen Hitchcock on the big screen—to see North By Northwest at The Senator.

“We really are so extraordinarily lucky to have those theaters.”

Both movie houses opened in 1939 as single-screen theaters, which at the time, says Kathleen Lyon, “was the only kind of movie theater there was.” The Charles was originally built in 1892 as a Baltimore Traction Company powerhouse and cable-car barn, designed by Baltimore architect Jackson C. Gott in the Romanesque-Revival style.

The theater became an art house in 1958 and was renamed The Charles, remodeled several times, expanding and transitioning to a first-run movie house, then an art house again, until it finally closed in 1993, as the neighborhood declined and moviegoers stayed home to watch videos with the advent of the VCR.

A few months before The Charles closed, Sandiford, then in his 20s, had been hired as a projectionist. It was a fortuitous hire. “John is the cinephile of the family,” says Lyon of her cousin, who broached the idea of taking over the imperiled theater to his uncle, a contractor and renovator of old buildings. (If you want to save a theater, the best folks to do so tend not to be those watching Fellini films in their basements, but somebody who owns a construction company.)

“He left all the equipment,” says Cusack of the previous operator, “just up and left. And John asked me what it would take to get it open.”

Sandiford and Cusack leased the theater, reopened it, then renovated and expanded it in 1998 into what had been Godfrey’s Famous Ballroom, converting the space in the process from a single-screen to a multi-screen theater. Baltimore architect Alex Castro reworked the historic spaces, retaining the original brickwork, adding stadium seating for the four new theaters, and opening the lobby space into what is now Tapas Teatro restaurant—a providential passageway, as you can now take your sangria and jamón serrano into the theater.

The retro ticket booth and concession stand were fabricated by local metalwork designer Jonathan Maxwell, who was a projectionist at The Charles when he was a student at Maryland Institute College of Art. (Maxwell would also go on to design the metalwork at The Senator.)

“It was like an all or nothing proposition,” says Lyon. “It was extremely risky. And there was really no way to know if it was going to work.”

“ALL THESE PEOPLE SEEM TO HAVE SEEN EVERYTHING, BUT THEY’VE NEVER SEEN IT IN THE THEATER.”

The Charles reopened in 1999. “John Waters came and it was just this magnificent, optimistic, idealistic celebration,” says Lyon. “It was a miracle that it happened. And then it made money and it worked.”

Unlike The Charles, The Senator was built as a movie theater. Designed by Baltimore architect John J. Zink in the Art-Deco style and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it showcases a two-story circular lobby, an extensive painted mural portraying the history of film, and the original wood paneling and terrazzo floor.

“The Senator was the premier showcase in the city,” says Lyon of the Govans movie house. “At the time, the city had myriad theaters, and The Senator was the jewel.”

The Senator was built for the Durkee family in 1939. Durkee Enterprises, which at one time owned many of Baltimore’s theaters—including the Ambassador, Arcade, Belnord, Boulevard, Patterson, and Waverly—continued to run The Senator through the decades. Barry Levinson’s Diner held its premier there in 1982. In the late ’80s, Tom Kiefaber, grandson of the chain’s founder, bought the theater, then the last single-screen movie house in Baltimore.

By then the jewel had become seriously tarnished, and its decline furthered, until the City bought the theater at auction in 2009. Cusack and his daughter leased the theater until they bought it in 2012.

“When The Senator was facing foreclosure, I was really upset. I took it personally,” says Amy Davis, a longtime staff photographer at The Baltimore Sun who has lived near The Senator for decades. “We could see the searchlights blazing the sky for grand openings from the window of our house.”

Davis took it so personally that she started cataloging the city’s older movie theaters with her camera, publishing a book, Flickering Treasures: Rediscovering Baltimore’s Forgotten Movie Theatres, in 2017.

“I give [the Cusack family] a lot of credit for keeping these theaters running, despite the odds. Look what happened to the Parkway,” she says, about the Parkway Theatre, a vaudeville-turned-movie theater that first opened in 1915, was renovated and reopened in 2017 after a nearly 30-year closure, only to close again in 2023, another victim of the pandemic. (Of the 72 theaters Davis profiles, only five are still open, and only two of those—The Sena tor and The Charles—still show movies.)

Cusack and Lyon worked the same magic on their second theater. “The building was in total disrepair. There were holes in the roof. It was falling down around us,” says Lyon, who by this time had left her career as a lawyer and joined her father running The Charles. (Lyon is now the sole lessee of The Charles and the owner of The Senator.)

“It’s just a blight in the neighborhood to have an empty movie theater. It’s just sad and depressing,” she continues. “These neighborhood theaters were all anchors,” says Davis, “in many cases really an important part of the identity of each neighborhood.”

So Cusack and Lyon did extensive renovations, built three additional screens, and put in a restaurant—Clark Burger, for movie-watching with cheeseburgers and poutine—just as they had done at The Charles.

“We restored all the architectural features, got the gold leaf back, had the mural on the ceiling repainted. We had a model built of the original Art Deco chandelier,” says Lyon, sighing. “It was a process.” When the theater did finally reopen, in 2013, it was with a screening of, appropriately, Waters’ Hairspray, which had also held its premier there 25 years earlier.

Andres Londoño began working at The Senator even before the Cusacks bought it. He stayed on, working at both theaters over the years, and is now the general manager at The Senator. That he’s finishing a degree not in film but in computer science comes in handy, he says, now that the theaters operate digitally. But he can also still operate the dual 35-millimeter projectors in both theaters, which was useful when Oppenheimer came out, the rare film that was distributed both digitally and in old-school film to those theaters that could still show it that way. (Sandiford, the former projectionist, also screens film movies sometimes for the revivals.)

Crammed into the central projection room upstairs at The Senator, those old projectors still stand, alongside digital projectors, an old film Autowind platter system, and a big black-box server emblazoned with a Ravens sticker.

“There’s so much history. It’s hard not to fall in love with them,” says Londoño of both theaters.

The Cusacks have succeeded in large part because they do pretty much all the work themselves. Buzz Cusack was his own general contractor for both theaters, and the fact that both Chris and Kathleen Lyon are lawyers likely helped with, well, everything.

During the pandemic, Chris, a trial attorney, ran his practice out of the office next to The Charles’ main projection room. And when the theaters finally reopened, he left the practice to work fulltime with his family. Cusack, now 83, still heads to The Charles most days, and he and his wife, Nancy, go to the movies on Saturdays, as they have for decades.

While big national movie chains have essentially turned into theme parks, with some even featuring in-seat dining and craft cocktails, the Cusacks have kept things old-school.

“We don’t overcomplicate it with hot foods; we don’t have nachos and hotdogs. We just try to keep our business model as simple as we can,” says Lyon. “Because there are so many moving parts, and it’s just us, and we don’t have layers of management, or even anyone who answers our phones. So we keep it as minimal as we can, and let the movies and the space speak for themselves.”

The revivals of recently restored, hard-to-find, or older movies, like the Jarmusch film, began soon after The Charles’ expansion. Sandiford started revival programs at both the Charles and Senator theaters, screening those films—recently: The French Connection, Oldboy, Delicatessen, The Thing, All About Eve—a few nights each week. These screenings might not always bring in a lot of revenue, but they bring in film buffs—and loyalty.

In the wake of the COVID lockdown, when theaters were shuttered for a year and a half and people stayed home watching movies, lots of movies, on their TVs and laptops and tiny phones, our appetite for watching movies on the big screen has only increased.

“All these people seem to have seen everything,” says Sandiford, “but they’ve never seen it in the theater.”

Cinema Sunday Club has also been a boost. It began at The Charles in 1995, when local movie-lover George Udel, longtime director of the Baltimore Film Forum, wanted Baltimore to have a cinema club and approached Cusack and Sandiford. (A colorful portrait of Udel painted by the late Baltimore artist Raoul Middleman hangs near the main auditorium.) Udel inaugurated and ran the club until his death in 1999, and it’s been going strong ever since, except for a hiatus during the pandemic.

“Cinema Sundays is having a real renaissance,” says Lyon of the club, in which members come for Sunday morning bagels, coffee and conversation, watch a current movie, then stay for a discussion led by a guest speaker. The club, now in its third decade and with attendance up to as many as 150, is now hosted by Howard Community College film professor Mike Giuliano. It’s composed not just of Charles loyalists, but, as Lyons puts it, “They are Cinema Sundays loyalists. It’s even deeper, it’s like another layer.”

Both Cinema Sundays and the revival programs also helped keep the theaters open after the pandemic, when many feared for the survival not just of neighborhood, family-run theaters, but of all movie theaters. “It cannot be overstated how devastating that was,” says Lyon. “We just went into this survival mode, where we had these two dark, empty buildings. We had no customers, no income, but we still had employees, we still had insurance premiums to pay, and we still had big bills. And the worst part of it was that we didn’t know when it was going to be over.”

Lyon says that she and her family wondered at what point they would have to sell their house, or just cut their losses and get out of the business.

“Everyone was just, ‘Doomsday, doomsday, you’re done,’” she says, as streaming took over the business model and many theaters shuttered for good. Both theaters rode out the pandemic, making COVID-related upgrades, getting PPP loans—and waiting. But even when the theaters were allowed to reopen, the future was hardly rosy, with audiences unsure about returning to public places, particularly the older viewers who fuel art-house theaters, and the industry itself unsure if people would just keep streaming movies at home rather than returning to actual movie houses.

“So then we were in this holding pattern of, like, Jesus, are we ever getting back to being able to sup port ourselves? Are movie theaters dead? Literally, it was the end of the world,” says Lyon. “The industry is dead in the water. It was just an ominous, stressful time—on the heels of a disaster.”

And then, just as moviegoers were returning and the industry was getting back on its feet, the Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, shutting down the movie pipeline again, pulling actors from promotional tours and red carpets, and condemning film lovers to more of an uncertain future.

But two things sustained theaters in the summer and fall of 2023: the Barbenheimer phenomenon, in which moviegoers returned in droves to see big-production films by Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan, and Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras Tour, which screened in theaters just as the summer films were leaving.

“The timing was impeccable. And you know, we sold out the theater. Thank you, Taylor,” says Lyon. “We have been very slowly climbing out of this multifaceted hole. It was not easy, but we survived.”

Those of us who love movies have also survived, turning off our devices and emerging from our houses to return to theaters and watch films on the big screen, where they are made to be seen. Buoyed by bigger-budget, more mainstream releases, The Senator has returned to 2019 numbers. The Charles, with its art-house, older crowd, has had a slower, less linear recovery, though Cinema Sundays and a devoted base have kept it going.

“It’s a testament to these theaters,” says Lyon. “They really have a unique place in people’s minds here.”

She also credits Baltimoreans. “They are loyal, and they are supportive,” she says.

As for her family, “We’re the stewards of these buildings; we’ve done the best job we possibly could, and we put our blood, sweat, and tears and everything else into this. They’re really just these special things.”

It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but world-renowned, Baltimore-based cinematographer Bradford Young came this close to being a mortician.

“I come from a long tradition of morticians,” he explains. “My uncle was a mortician. My great-grandfather was a mortician. My grandfather. My cousins. My aunts were in the game, as well. It was expected—in my mind that’s what I was always going to do.”

Growing up in Louisville, he’d always been exposed to the arts, especially Black-focused arts. His grandparents took him to see Porgy and Bess at The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. There was work by mainly Black artists on the walls. He had an uncle, Leon Bibb, a musician, activist, and actor, who was close friends with Paul Robeson and had marched at Selma. (In a full circle moment, of sorts, Young was the cinematographer on Ava DuVernay’s Selma). His cousin Eric Bibb is an internationally famous blues guitarist and songwriter.

Still, the 43-year-old Young admits, “I was too scared to be in that narrative.” At that point in his life, he had yet to see himself as an artist.

As a “crusty little weird kid” growing up in the South in the ’90s, he found a small pocket of friends like him—kids who were into art, and especially hip-hop music, which shaped his worldview.

“Hip-hop was teaching us how to be African-centered,” he says. “How to be Black.”

Then, in 1993, something happened that rocked his world—and changed the trajectory of his life. His mother, who was divorced from his dad, got sick, and, after a long illness, she died. Young was 15. He moved to Chicago to live with his dad. And living in the Windy City changed everything.

“Leaving Kentucky was difficult, but in a way, it was also the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says.

If he had stayed in Louisville, followed that family business, he says, “I would’ve been living a lie.”

“I BEGAN TO SEE HOW IMAGE CONNECTS TO STORY …THAT’S HOW IT ALL STARTED.”

In Louisville, it had been easy to find the kids like him—because there were so few of them. But Chicago was different—lots of kids were into hip-hop. But not all were into art and culture like he was. He admits things could’ve gone badly for him—especially since he was new in town and grieving. But he was supported by his father, his two sisters, the rest of his family, his friends.

“They held me up. I could’ve gone in a totally different direction,” he says. “I could’ve gone down a self-destructive route. Dropped out of school. But that never happened.”

One day, he went to a Common show (another full-circle moment: Young would go on to direct the film short companion to Common’s Black America Again album). He saw a girl there—her name was Candace. He liked her vibe. They exchanged numbers and became friends (they’re still good friends to this day). One night, she invited him to her apartment in Hyde Park, where she lived with her mother. When he got there, he fell in love with the space—the books, the music, the art on the walls.

Her mother was watching a movie, Like Water for Chocolate, which he’d never seen before. His knowledge of film was fairly limited, especially when it came to “indie” film, where the only director he was really familiar with was Spike Lee.

On the coffee table, there was a book about the groundbreaking Julie Dash film Daughters of the Dust. He started flipping through the book, fascinated by the beautiful images of mostly Black women in pastoral settings, dressed in flowing white garb. In the back of book, there was an essay by the film’s cinematographer, Arthur Jafa.

“I learned he was from Mississippi, which made me feel a connection,” Young says. “The language he was using to describe the images of the film was so smart. I never thought about movies that way. It really stuck with me.”

The next year, Lee’s Crooklyn came out. “And I realized that [Jafa] shot it, and it was just like, ‘Wow, this film thing is amazing.’”

Another time, he was driving with his father when, out of the blue, his dad began talking about Spike Lee’s other famous cinematographer, Ernest R. Dickerson.

“The cinematography thing kept coming up,” Young says. “But I was like, “That’s not me. I don’t even know what film school is. How do you do that?”

From Chicago, he went on to Howard University with plans of becoming a writer, though the notion of pursuing film was definitely rattling around in his head. It just so happened that he was at Howard the same time as the late actor Chadwick Boseman, the producer and curator Kamilah Forbes, and the public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. They were his age, but he looked up to them.

“I always felt like I was the little brother. These were 18-year-old kids who were already fully realized, fully robust artists,” he says. “I was just like a little skinny kid walking around observing all these giants.”

Young joined the Howard University Film Organization, not necessarily to be a filmmaker, but to hang out with the students in the department.

A professor at Howard, the filmmaker Haile Gerima, expanded his film vocabulary. Gerima showed him his own film, Sankofa, as well as other Black-helmed films such as Killer of Sheep and Black Girl.

Suddenly Young realized there was this whole world of Black film out there that he had not been privy to—a thriving universe outside the mainstream. He began to think about how the exclusionary world of white film was a “weapon against my humanity.”

“I WAS JUST THIS LITTLE SKINNY KID WALKING AROUND AND OBSERVING ALL THESE GIANTS.”

He took a year abroad in England and expanded his filmic horizons even further, feasting on the works of Godard, Tarkovsky, and others.

“I started watching films for images. I began to see how image connects to story and how story connects to image,” he says. “That’s how it all started. And I decided, I’m going to finally claim this. I’m a cinematographer.”

Back at Howard, he made three student films with Boseman.

“He was such a force of nature,” Young says. “He was no less positive and bright and brilliant then. I loved him.”

Boseman, Forbes, and Coates taught Young a lot about how to be an artist, and how to value and nurture Black art and culture, he says. He left Howard with the understanding that, “If there’s no art, there’s no culture, and if there’s no culture, there’s no people.”

After graduating in 1999, he moved to Brooklyn and started getting his first gigs as a professional cinematographer. There was his debut feature, Mississippi Damned, about growing up poor and Black in the south.

There was also a short film, Pariah, directed by a friend of a friend, Dee Rees. Thanks to a Sundance grant, Rees was able to turn her short into a feature. That was a turning point. Pariah became a buzzy Sundance hit.

Young won Best Cinematographer there in 2011 (he would win again the following year). And around that time, he caught the attention of a rising young director named Ava DuVernay. With her, he ended up making some of the most critically acclaimed work of his career: Middle of Nowhere, Selma, and the gut-wrenching miniseries about the Central Park Five (now the “Exonerated Five”), When They See Us.

Young credits DuVernay with a lot—he talks about her “wisdom and wonderfulness”—but he especially appreciates that she, “left her foot in the door”—that is, allowed more young Black artists to follow her into the Hollywood mainstream. Which is something Young is more than slightly ambivalent about.

If Young’s relationship with Hollywood were a Facebook status, it would read: “It’s complicated.”

That moment in college when he realized there was rich, dynamic Black film world outside the scope of so-called cinematic canon was revelatory for him. He realized that he needed to carve out his own space in the film world, with his friends, with the people he wanted to collaborate with, the ones who inspired him.

“We want real freedom for ourselves to tell stories the way we wanted to, structurally and artistically,” he says. In other words, he wasn’t chasing Hollywood success. He was building success on his own terms.

“What makes Bradford great is his commitment to his ancestors backward and forward in time and his faith in cinema,” says the filmmaker Terence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness), who, along with Young and director Jenn Nkiru, cofounded the Ummah Chroma (“community of color”) artists’ collective.

But as that success grew, Hollywood came calling. Young was the cinematographer on Arrival. He was asked to join the Lucasfilm project Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Despite some of the well-documented tensions on the set, he says he had a great and fulfilling time and would happily work with Lucasfilm again.) In fact, he was in London, on pre-production for Solo, when a co-worker turned to him and said, “Congratulations.”

“For what?” Young said.

He had been nominated for an Oscar for his work in Arrival. He was the first African American to receive a Best Cinematography nomination.

His 2017 Oscar nomination, Young says, was “bittersweet.”

“I’ll be honest. I have a very contentious relationship [with the Oscars]. Maybe there’s something to appreciate about them, but I haven’t found that space for myself yet,” he says. He admits that he didn’t even want to attend the ceremony.

“I just wanted to stay in London and focus on my work,” he says. But a conversation with his friend, the filmmaker Malik Sayeed, changed that.

“He said, ‘You’re being put in this place for a reason. I’m going to send you something.’ And when I hung up, he sent me a picture of four kids in alleyway somewhere in Africa, and there’s a kid with a broom pole and a camera made from a box and here’s two kids facing off like an action film. And I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, for those kids, or the kid in Baltimore who has faith in the country that they can be part of the culture, for them, maybe it’s important for me to be there.’ And I decided to go.”

“SHE SAID, ‘COME TO BALTIMORE. IT’S A COOL SCENE…IT’S EVERYTHING WE’VE ALWAYS IMAGINED.’”

Young moved to Baltimore with his wife, Stephanie Etienne, a midwife and maternal activist, in 2016, right before he went to film Solo. They already had two young sons and a daughter on the way. As a cinematographer, Young had gone where the work had taken him—and the family had always packed up their stuff and gone with him.

There were stints in London and Hollywood. He had lived in Brooklyn for a while but hated how gentrified the neighborhood had become. The family also lived in Takoma Park, an area Young was familiar with from Howard University. It was his friend, the producer, artist, and filmmaker Elissa Blount Moorhead, who had suggested Baltimore.

“She basically said, ‘Come to Baltimore. It’s a cool scene…[There are] all these Black families here. All these Black children running around. It’s everything we’ve always imagined.’”

So he came. Bought a house in Reservoir Hill, specifically choosing that neighborhood not just for its beautiful architecture but because it wasn’t fully gentrified yet. “I want my kids to see their people,” he says. “I want them to walk outside their house and see low-earning Black people and high-earning Black people. A lot of American cities don’t have that. And that’s their loss.” He fell in love with the city.

“Baltimore has such a beautiful vibe,” Young says. “What’s great about Baltimore is that all the people that are from here, they really welcomed us here. We’re still in this process of asking permission to be in a town that has such a beautiful, sacred culture.”

He immediately found a community of Black parents and artists and makers—“framily,” Moorhead calls them. He and Moorhead collaborated on an experimental art film, Back in Song, that was installed at the BMA. They’re working on another, top secret project, right now. She explains what’s so great about Young’s work.

“He doesn’t possess a disingenuous bone in his body,” she says. “His lens is a reflection of his heart. He has a deep understanding of who he is and where he fits on the continuum of Black history and Blackness. The biggest thing is that he doesn’t lie in his work. Also, he works really hard, and he’s a master craftsman.”

And what Young is doing in Baltimore represents what he hopes is the next chapter of his career. When asked if he wants to direct, he hesitates and says, “Yeah, I have stories I want to tell.” But not necessarily in the traditional sense. “I don’t want to create in the space of the push and pull of filmmaking culture. I just want to make it private with a few friends and let it be what it’s going to be. What I’m really looking for now is uninterrupted freedom to tell stories however I want to.”

He says he’ll keep making commercials to make money between projects. (He rattles off some of the brands he’s lensed for, some you may have heard of: Apple, Audi, Nike, IBM, and Facebook.)  He’ll continue to make “Hollywood” films that call out to him and work with artists and directors he admires and trusts. But he’s not courting mainstream success.

“I’m happy to make films that may not ever open in a theater,” he says. “That may only open in Sankofa Video and Book store in D.C. or the Underground Museum in L.A. Or maybe we project it on a wall somewhere in Sandtown. That’s all it needs to be for me.”

Sandra Gibson was in the midst of planning the 2020 Maryland Film Festival when the pandemic hit. Her team ultimately moved the whole thing online, but at the time, she had no idea that the 2021 festival (from May 19-27) would also have to go virtual. On the plus side, this unusual year has given her lots of time to reimagine the Parkway Theatre and its role in both the Station North community and all of Baltimore.

First of all, how did last year’s virtual fest go?
For a bootstrap thing, we think it went extraordinarily well. It was a brand-new platform. We were inventing as we went. We had 17 feature films. 150 filmmakers. 15 blocks of shorts. [We had] world, North American, and Baltimore premieres. We had a few thousand people participate. All 50 states. We hadn’t had that kind of participation before, so the reach was greatly expanded.

What made you decide to go virtual again this year?
It was an agonizing decision. We just didn’t believe it would be safe enough, that audiences would be comfortable enough, or that we’d actually be able to open at enough of a capacity to have the festival in-person. Plus, the Maryland Institute College of Art told us they weren’t inviting anyone onto their campus, and we use their facilities, so that sort of made the decision for us.

But it will still be a great festival. You have to create the excitement differently. We’re adding family programming. We’re looking for spaces to do drive-in screenings. There will be more in-depth conversations. There will be surprises. I don’t have the [full] lineup yet, but we’ll probably have 32 events like we did last year, and we’ve extended it through the 27th for extra viewing time. It’s a lot to go through. But you can actually watch everything in nine days, if you’re truly committed.

You’re in the midst of making a lot of changes to the Parkway, too.
The plan is to fully activate the entire building—really set it up to do exhibitions, installations, small public art pieces. Things that provide extra context and give people a reason to drop by. We’re trying to be more community responsive, more socially engaged. We’ve sort of coined this as “art house plus”—the best of art house, the best of a contemporary art museum. We’re going to be launching a center for moving image. We’ll still have our theatrical releases, but it’s going to be plussed up in a way that is not only inviting but fits our community.

How do you make the Parkway a place where everyone feels at home year-round?
It all comes down to community programming. How do we build programs that feature the themes and ideas that matter to the people that live in our area? You have to be in the community. You have to be conversant and interested in where the community’s at, and support the community in its effort, its demands, its needs, and its growth and evolution. That work takes time. We’re starting to get on that path. We’re building a community advisory panel. [Filmmaker] Radha Blank said it best—we were premiering an episode of Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It that hadn’t been released yet, and she got up and said, “The Parkway is my birthright.” If you don’t feel comfortable here, make it your own. You have to do that. This place belongs to you.

Using Ilford photo paper and film, Baltimore School for the Arts seniors Aleeia Townes, Andrew Selway, Kandice Johnson, Dionna Richardson, Myah Stokes, Sydney Adams, Zoe Jackson, and Freddy Wolfe printed the following works in the school’s darkroom just before the COVID-19 lockdown and cancellation of school for the year.

They’ve spent the last two months of their senior year at home, wrapping up the remainder of their classwork and capturing their final photography projects digitally.

“It’s been a lot slower,” says Wolfe. “The lack of people makes for some very isolated work. I’ve been appreciating nature and being outside much more.”

With the uncertainty surrounding when school structure will eventually resume as normal, Wolfe and his classmates might be the last film students to work hands-on in a darkroom setting for many months ahead.

We hope that this isn’t the case, for their sake and the sake of photography’s future.

The students’ senior showcase was set to take place at the Luann Carra Gallery in Fells Point. In the wake of its cancellation, we’ve compiled a digital gallery of the last images they printed in the darkroom in February and March.

Aleeia Townes

Andrew Selway

Kandice Johnson

Dionna Richardson

Myah Stokes

Sydney Adams

Zoe Jackson

Freddy Wolfe

[Editor’s note: We will continue to update this space as more information becomes available.]

Following an announcement by Governor Larry Hogan on March 12 that all gatherings of 250 people or more are to be postponed, many of Baltimore’s venues and art spaces have announced cancellations and rescheduled events. Here’s what’s still open, what’s coming later this year, and what to expect from the weeks ahead.

Visual Arts

The JHU Museums have announced that, as of March 16, all locations will be closed and public programs through April 12 are postponed or canceled. The American Visionary Art Museum has closed through March 31, with public programs and tours cancelled through April 12. The previously scheduled Logan Visionary Eco-Conference has been postponed to a later date.

Leadership teams are hoping that the BMA’s 2020 Vision Community Celebration and the opening for Brice Brown’s PROSCENIUM at Evergreen Library and Museum can be rescheduled for later in the year.

The Walters Art Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art have closed to the public through March 31 and cancelled all events and programming through April 12. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum is also closed to the public, and a reopening date has yet to be released.

Some options remain for viewing museum collections. The Walters’ St. Francis Missal can be viewed in full on the museum’s Ex Libris site along with many other precious manuscripts.

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & Arts announced that all galleries and attractions will be closed starting March 14.

Events related to Maryland Art Place’s Out of Order and Merkin Dream have been postponed, with new dates TBA. Y:Art Gallery has cancelled its March 21 artist talk with Maureen Delaney, Erin Raedeke, and Richard Townsend but will remain open for regular business. Please check with your local galleries for information on postponements and adjusted hours.

Music

Creative Alliance has instituted a new full refund/exchange policy during the month of March and fully canceled the March 21 performance by the Marja Mortensson Trio. The annual Baltimore Old Time Music Festival has been postponed, and the leadership team is currently looking at new weekends, likely in the summer, to hold the event. Tickets will be transferred to the new date once it is confirmed, and refunds will be available at that time for those who do not wish to attend.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and other events scheduled at both the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and The Music Center at Strathmore are cancelled through March 21. BSO president and CEO released the following statement regarding the closure: “Of course, as recent history has shown us, the BSO has navigated challenging times thanks to the collective support and strength of our community. In addition to inviting patrons to exchange into future programs, we are also deeply appreciative to those patrons who would consider donating their tickets to support the BSO at a pivotal time in our transformation.”

The Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric has postponed all events through March 18, and some performances have already begun being rescheduled for this summer.

Horse Lords, Mdou Moctar, Versus, and Joy Postell have postponed their upcoming shows at the Ottobar, though the venue remains open at this time. According to the Ottobar Facebook page, “Our plan is to remain open this weekend in full capacity, and evaluate throughout. We’ll then start the new week studying the news and continue on from there…We will post online and our website any sudden changes that may arise. If you do not feel comfortable attending a show, you have the option to adjust or refund your ticket.”

Rams Head Live! has closed indefinitely in response to the 250+ gathering rule, and will work to reschedule impacted performances. Tickets for performances that are rescheduled will remain valid, and tickets for shows that cannot be rescheduled will be refunded within 30 days of an announcement of cancellation. Baltimore Soundstage and Metro Gallery have also postponed events through late March.

Sound Garden announced today that Record Store Day will be moved to June 20, 2020, affecting all area record stores.

Literature

Enoch Pratt Libraries has closed to the public, and all public programs, including the CityLit Festival, are postponed or cancelled through March 31.

According to a statement from Enoch Pratt CEO Heidi Daniel, the library is expanding programs for those stuck at home, including instituting a digital library card program to offer those without library cards the opportunity to register for instant access to online materials and databases. The Books by Mail program for homebound customers will also be expanding and can be initiated by contacting the library’s circulation department.

Greedy Reads has closed to the public and suspended all events through the month of March at both locations, but patrons can still make purchases via phone/email for pick up or delivery, or through bookshop.org and Libro.fm. Charm City Books announced that all events are cancelled. In addition, all Charm City Books stock will be available for purchase online, and delivery within Baltimore City is available for free. For those outside the city, delivery is still an option at the cost of $5 or less. Events at The Ivy Bookshop and Bird in Hand are cancelled through March 30, and updates will be posted as soon as new dates are scheduled.

Theater

As of March 12, the Hippodrome Theatre has cancelled the upcoming Celtic Woman and The Band’s Visit touring dates and shared the following: “If you are a ticket holder for one of these events, please hold onto your tickets as we work to reschedule their performances in Baltimore. We will be in touch in the next 7-14 days with more information on the status of this event.”

Everyman Theatre has waived ticket exchange fees and upgrade charges for the remainder of the New Voices Festival, and the two remaining shows in the festival, Cry It Out and Berta, Berta, have been postponed to the summer. Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains will be suspended following the March 14 performance and resume on April 15. The theater’s annual gala, originally scheduled for March 14, has also been postponed. Center Stage has postponed the Baltimore Butterfly Session previously scheduled for March 14, but is organizing with local artists to hold a virtual discussion about responses to the current public health crisis within the creative community. More information about this online gathering can be found here.

Charm City Players’ production of Matilda originally scheduled for March 14-29 is postponed, and CCP has encouraged ticket holders to keep their tickets while they work to reschedule show dates. Announcements regarding the status of the show will be communicated over the next two weeks.

Baltimore Improv Group’s managing director Terry Withers announced on Thursday that it would suspend all performances starting March 16 and reevaluate the following week. This includes practices, meetings, and unofficial gatherings at BIG’s theater and training center. Classes will continue but switch to larger venues to enable distance between performers beginning March 16.

Vagabond Players will suspend the remaining performances of Constellations, which were originally scheduled through March 22. The Fells Point company will offer ticket holders refunds or exchanges for future performances.

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, which had previously reduced seating capacity to promote social distancing, has suspended The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and March student matinees for Romeo and Juliet after March 15. Those with tickets to this weekend’s shows are asked to make responsible choices about their attendance. Options for ticket holders beyond those dates are outlined here, and the company hopes to continue with Studio classes.

The closing weekend of The Mineola Twins at Fells Point Corner Theatre has been suspended, and plans for the upcoming production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf are to be determined. Tickets for the current production can be exchanged for future performances.

Arena Players is suspended through March 27 and has also reduced seating capacity for its shows effective immediately. Spotlighters Theatre has delayed the opening of its Dogfight until March 26. The Strand remains open with increased sanitation measures.

Film

The SNF Parkway Theatre is closed from March 13-March 26, and the theater will be deep-cleaned before staff and patrons return at the end of the month. The Charles, CinéBistro at The Rotunda, The Landmark Harbor East, and The Senator Theatre will be closing by end of day March 16 in response to the latest announcement by Gov. Hogan.

The Black Femme Supremacy Film Fest is coming to the Parkway Theatre this weekend, kicking off this Friday night with a screening of Jezebel, followed by a Q&A with writer/director and co-star Numa Perrier. (Back when the an all-shorts version of BFS Film Fest was at the Creative Alliance, we wrote about it here.) Below is my review of the opening night title.

Reading the plot synopsis of Jezebel, you might think it’s a tragedy: After the death of her mother, a 19-year-old woman is forced to become an online sex worker to make ends meet. But Jezebel, which is a semi-autobiographical account of writer-director Numa Perrier’s own life, is actually full of wit and candor, and it has a very matter-of-fact (and sometimes even joyful) approach to the work that young Tiffany (an excellent Tiffany Tenile) does.

When we first meet Tiffany, she’s living in a cramped apartment with her older sister Sabrina (played by Perrier), her brother, her young niece, and Sabrina’s layabout boyfriend (Bobby Field). Sabrina herself is a phone sex operator, which can be a bit awkward in the small space (the walls aren’t soundproof). So when their mother, whom we never meet, dies in hospice care, it’s time for Tiffany to do her part. Sabrina finds an ad for online sex workers—basically a live streaming video chat room, where women take off their clothing and writhe around on a mattress for the titillation of watching men who pay by the minute—and tells Tiffany to sign up. She even gifts Tiffany a long wig—named “the Jezebel”—and instead of being disgusted or scared, Tiffany proudly sports the wig, feeling somewhat empowered by this new mane of hair.

She goes to the address in the ad and is met by Chuck, a bland-looking type who runs the operation with his sister, who is also a sex worker. The apartment where the business is headquartered is a little seedy, but not dangerously so. What makes the whole thing funny is how normal it all is: Chuck could literally be a middle manager at a Walmart. Tiffany chooses the name Jezebel and is on her way. She finds that some of the men don’t even want simulated sex—they just want conversation or physical manifestations of whatever fetish they might possess. (One sex worker is told to lie back on the bed and literally do nothing for the duration of her session; she often falls asleep.) Tiffany gets a regular customer named Bobby (Brett Gelman), who likes to be dominated and has a foot fetish. Tiffany actually is fond of him.

Jezebel is not without its flaws. It’s not particularly good at masking its low budget. The film has an unfortunate habit of announcing that people are off to do something—visiting mom at the hospice, going to the laundromat, etc.—and then cutting directly to a scene of them returning to the apartment. But Jezebel feels authentic, because it is: a different kind of coming-of-age film and a non-judgmental look at an industry that is often shrouded in secrecy. So does Tiffany emerge unscathed from this chapter of her life? Well, based on this promising debut by Perrier, it seems she did more than survive, she thrived.

A pair of gold statues sits prominently on Pat Moran’s desk in her Canton office. Amidst the clutter of paperwork and stacks of DVDs, the figures of a winged woman holding a globe aloft are instantly recognizable as Emmys, the television industry’s most prestigious award. But look closely and you might notice that one of Moran’s Emmys—the one she received last year for casting HBO’sGame Change—has a busted wing with a Band-Aid affixed to it. And its globe is dented.

“It took a header on to the floor,” says Moran, her voice rising with each word.

Until recently, the Emmys sat atop pedestals in the upstairs living room of her Mt. Vernon home. That is until a strong wind gusted across Park Avenue, dislodging a painted screen that toppled the Emmy and nearly gave its recipient a coronary. “I almost had a heart attack,” says Moran. “But if it had happened 25 years ago, I would have flipped out and gone ballistic. I’m a lot better now than the lunatic I used to be.”

The wounded Emmy is indicative of how Moran, a longtime presence in the local film community, has changed. Around town, she has long been known for her flame-red hair, sharp demeanor that doesn’t suffer fools, and keen eye for talent. She has, of late, risen to the pinnacle of her profession and, dare it be said, mellowed somewhat in the process. Moran’s longtime friend and confidant John Waters, who’s known her for almost 50 years, says that “her rage level has gone down, and she seems happier than ever.”

Why shouldn’t she be? She’s cast nearly every film and television project that’s come through town, including Waters’s films, Barry Levinson’s Avalon and Liberty Heights, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire (recently cited by Entertainment Weeklyas the best TV show of all time), and the HBO comedy series, Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who’s featured in this month’s Best Of story). She’s been nominated for seven Primetime Emmys, won twice, and earned respect throughout the industry.

David Rubin, casting director of blockbusters such as Men in Black and The English Patient, sponsored Moran for membership in the Casting Society of America. He marvels at her ability to “recognize talent on the fringes of the mainstream and understand the inner life of characters on a script’s page.”

Jane Love, associate executive director of the Screen Actors Guild’s Washington-Mid Atlantic local, calls Moran “a treasure”; The Wire creator David Simon says she’s “a mad genius”; and Veep producer Stephanie Laing floats the L-word—“Pat Moran is a legend,” she says.

But Moran will have none of it. “A legend is Cecil B. DeMille,” she says. “That’s what I think of as a legend, not me.”

She tips her head back, sniffs the air, and adopts a tone of privilege. “Oh, could you pass me that?” she says to some imagined minion, and then smiles demurely, blinks her eyes, and points to herself. “Legend.”

“Could I have that seat?” she asks, pointing to herself again. “Legend.” She quickly snaps out of it. “Are you kidding?” she asks. “My whole career has been one big accident. I’m just lucky to have gotten out of Catonsville.”

“My whole career has been one big accident.”

Moran grew up in Catonsville, in a Civil War-era house at the corner of Beechfield and Frederick avenues. Her grandparents had emigrated from Ireland and lived nearby, over a grocery/liquor store run by her parents. Moran’s father worked nights as a musician, leading the Johnny Moran Orchestra, a local big band known for playing midnight cruises on the S.S. Tolchester. The oldest of five children (she has four younger brothers), Pat learned to identify Benny Goodman songs but never learned to ride a bike; she knew of big band leader Si Zentner but didn’t know how to swim, which was fine by her. “I never wanted to be a child,” she says, “and I never cared about the things most kids did.”

Moran preferred hanging out with her mother, Grace. She admired her smarts and keen instincts, which her mother attributed to being born on Friday the 13th with a “veil” over her face. The veil—actually, a portion of the birth membrane called a caul—was surgically removed and sold to a local seaman who, like superstitious sailors for centuries, believed that possessing it would prevent his ship from sinking. “That always gave my mother a kind of spookiness,” says Moran, “and she felt she had sort of a sixth sense because of it. Fifteen people could be in a room, and she could immediately tell you who was good and who was bad.”

“I’m the same way,” she continues, “if there’s a situation, I go with my gut feeling. John [Waters] says I have ‘a contempt prior to investigation,’ but why investigate? It usually turns out to be exactly what I thought at the very beginning.”

Moran graduated from Mount de Sales Academy, an all-girls Catholic school, “at a time when women weren’t supposed to have opinions or any bits of creativity,” she says. “If you could balance a teacup on your knee, that was great.”

Though she received an excellent education and developed a cultured confidence that dovetailed with the manners she learned at home, “it was dullsville,” says Moran, who longed to escape. She had read about beatniks and wanted to be one.

She happened to meet Barry Narlines while working as a clerk at the Social Security Administration in the early 1960s. He remembers it well. “Pat stood out, and she was a notch above everyone else,” says Narlines, who was a supervisor at the time. “She was sophisticated, had the most amazing sense of humor, and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. We just clicked.”

Narlines was gay, lived in Mt. Vernon, and was interested in opera, theater, movies, music, fashion, art, and current events—“everything I loved,” recalls Moran, who began hanging out with Narlines at Leon’s, a gay bar on the corner of Park Avenue and Tyson Street.

Her mother was appalled she was going downtown, but approved of the friendship with Narlines because Pat felt safe and comfortable around him and his friends. “They introduced me to a whole new world of style and taste,” says Moran. “Gay men liberated me from Middle America.”

“Gay men liberated me from Middle America.”

Moran eventually migrated to Martick’s, Baltimore’s premier bohemian hangout on W. Mulberry Street, where she befriended another tribe of colorful characters and, sometimes, worked as a cocktail waitress. One night, she ran into an aspiring filmmaker from Lutherville hanging out in the alley adjacent to the bar. In 1964, John Waters wasn’t old enough to get into Martick’s—in fact, he was still in high school—but some of the regulars snuck him drinks. Like Moran, he was a refugee from the county, and they became fast friends. “We had both ventured downtown and found the world we were looking for,” Waters says. “Pat may have worked at Social Security by day, but she was a beatnik goddess at night.”

They hitchhiked to New York together, discovered the underground films of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and hung out with similarly spirited misfits like Divine, David Lochary, and Mink Stole, who all contributed mightily to Waters’s early career. But no one did more than Moran. “She was so professional and set a really good example,” says Stole, before lauding Moran’s resourcefulness, determination, and fierce loyalty.

“At first, it was just me and her,” says Waters. “Pat did whatever was needed,” which meant everything from finding actors and securing locations (Divine’s steak-stealing scene in Pink Flamingos was shot inside her parents’ store) to playing Dr. Coathanger’s Secretary (in 1969’s Mondo Trasho).

Moran also left Social Security for a series of jobs downtown: selling tickets at Center Stage, briefly operating a hot dog stand on Read Street, opening a vintage clothing shop called Divine Trash, and, later, running The Charles Theatre. She exhibited a savvy resourcefulness in those jobs, as well, and Waters recalls the time a candle accidentally set a customer’s hair on fire at the shop. “Pat didn’t even apologize,” says Waters. “She just sold her a hat.”

But as Waters’s productions grew bigger, Moran focused exclusively on casting and found she had a knack for putting real, authentic-looking characters on screen. And as his reputation soared with films like Hairspray and Cry-Baby, her stock went up, too.

She accompanied Waters to film festivals—he calls her “the perfect fake wife”—and remembers walking the red carpet at Cannes, spotting heroes like actress Jean Moreau, and exchanging “Can you believe this?” looks. At one point, Moran leaned into Waters and quipped, “It’s a long way from Martick’s, isn’t it?”

Besides working with Waters, she worked on films like Her Alibi and Clara’s Heart, and when NBC and Barry Levinson brought the TV series Homicide to town in the early-1990s, they tapped Moran for casting the extras. “I’d worked with Barry before, but the network didn’t have any relationship with me,” says Moran. “At that time, I was just a maniac known for working with a tribe of lunatics.”

As the show progressed, Moran earned the network’s trust and was given the additional responsibility of casting day players and other speaking roles. By the time Homicide wrapped in 1999, she’d won her first Emmy and had a career in show business.

“John Waters showed me how to make movies,” says Moran, “and Barry Levinson legitimized me.”

On a Wednesday afternoon in June, Moran’s office is packed with aspiring actors. She’s auditioning roles for an indie docudrama about British spies during World War II. Moran’s husband, Chuck Yeaton—they’ve been together since 1970 and have two grown children—summons them one-by-one to “the box.” Named after the interrogation room in Homicide, its walls are lined with memorabilia, signs (including one reading “Moran’s Wacko Ward”), and headshots of stars who’ve worked with her, including Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, and Whoopi Goldberg.

A procession of actors sits in front of Moran and her assistant, Scott Goergens, who records each audition and reads dialogue as needed. Over the course of the two-hour session, Moran exhibits unflagging energy, giving the actors background information about the plot and offering spirited, no-nonsense direction about how a scene should be played. Her disarming suggestions seem to ease tension and calm actors’ nerves.

Veep’s Stephanie Laing, who’s been in “the box” with Moran, notes how she “takes more of a lead than most casting directors. Her casting sessions are a show in itself, because she’s so hands-on trying to bring out the best in an actor.”

Moran intently watches each audition on a flat-screen TV, giving feedback on practice takes and offering advice.

“Keep in mind that you’re not playing to the back row. The camera picks up everything.”

“Try not to punch the last word.”

“Pump your volume up and don’t make it so sinister.”

“Never start a scene that big, unless it’s one where you’re getting murdered.”

After the recorded take is complete, she’s all business. “Okay, that’s all we need,” she says in a clear, clipped voice. “Thank you. Bye bye.” There’s no opening for conversation, as she makes notes on a clipboard in her lap. Each audition lasts about five minutes.

Between actors, she whispers her impressions to Goergens, observations like “Great look, but I didn’t believe a word he said,” or “If we go wider [in our search], and I think we should, he gets a call back.”

It’s that confident, nearly instant, evaluation of talent (her mother would be proud) and ability to match someone with not only the role they’ll play, but the space they’ll occupy, that’s become Moran’s calling card. That’s why Baltimoreans recognize themselves inHomicide and The Wire, arguably her two greatest accomplishments.

“It’s not that she’s merely a good judge of talent, it’s that she’s an exceptional judge of Baltimore,” says David Simon. “There were times when people would walk into auditions with faces, bodies, demeanors, or accents that any other casting agent in America would say, ‘How do I put this [peculiar] fella in front of a camera?’ And Pat would think, ‘Now, this is Baltimore.’

“Invariably, she would be right. She’s not interested in making the world prettier, shapelier, cleaner, or less idiosyncratic than it is. She’s interested in replicating the world that we all know.”

She understands, as fellow casting director David Rubin will tell you, that when a character with only one line has their moment in the center of a movie screen, 30 feet tall, they are the star of the film.

“When I read a script, I see people in those roles, all the roles,” she says, during a break. “And when someone walks through that door, I want to give them a job. It makes my life easier.”

With that, the break is over.

“Next!” Moran hollers, and another actor makes his way to “the box.”

Gloria Bell is Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s adaptation of his own critically acclaimed film, Gloria (which I didn’t see). This time it takes place in America and stars Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore. The pedigree is certainly there. But for me, something got very lost in translation.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will share that Gloria Bell is currently sitting with a gaudy 96 percent Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. So I’m clearly on an island here, but I found the film mystifying and even off-putting.

In theory I should love a film about the sex life of a middle-aged divorcee. Honestly, any film that acknowledges that female sexuality doesn’t shrivel up and die after the age of 50 should be cause for celebration. But after spending roughly 110 minutes in Gloria’s company, I still don’t know how I was supposed to feel about her. I couldn’t even describe her character’s arc. If Gloria went on an emotional journey, someone forgot to give me the GPS.

I’m generally a huge fan of Julianne Moore, but I didn’t understand her choices here. She plays Gloria as gauzy, wishy-washy, muted. In some senses, Gloria is that overlooked middle-aged woman we’ve seen in films before: “It’s your mother,” she adds hastily at the end of voicemails she leaves her grown daughter and son. (She’s so insecure she’s not sure they would recognize her voice.) But there’s little sense that she’s belittled or overlooked in life. She works for an insurance company, and although we see very little of her professional life, there’s no condescending boss, no obnoxiously flirty coworker. Instead, she has a best friend at work who is being forced into early retirement. She shouts “You go, girl” affirmations with her friend out the window.

Gloria seems to have a deep streak of melancholy about her, but she’s no wallflower. She goes to a dance club that caters to the 50-plus set—the music is mostly disco with some early New Wave thrown in—and drinks martinis and dances with randy older men. Her children, in fact, don’t ignore her—they love her and are reasonably involved in her life. They have problems of their own. Peter (Michael Cera) has been abandoned by his wife and left to raise their baby by himself. Anne (Caren Pistorius) is in love with a Swedish big wave surfer who seems unlikely to put down roots. Gloria also has good friends—she goes to dinner parties; attends weddings—and is still close to her glamorous, if somewhat death-obsessed mother (Holland Taylor).

She’s pretty—and she knows it. At a bar one night, a woman asks if she’s had work done. “No,” she replies with a laugh, flattered.

So no, she’s not a loser. Not really a pushover or a mouse—although Moore plays her so tentatively she seems like maybe we’re supposed to think she’s those things.

Into this equation comes Arnold (John Turturro), a recently divorced man who makes eyes at Gloria at the over-age disco. They dance, hook up, and start dating each other. Arnold seems nice enough. He’s apparently a conservative—in one scene, he argues that everything is cyclical and climate change is overhyped. I thought this might be a bone of contention. Will Gloria argue with him? Challenge his assumptions? Nope. This is one of many random details dropped into the film that amount to nothing.

Another: Gloria has an upstairs neighbor, a young man who seems to be having a breakdown of some sort. He yells at the walls. Gloria calls the landlord, who happens to be the neighbor’s father, and gently informs him his son isn’t well. At one point, the neighbor accidentally drops a bag of weed in front of Gloria’s door. She smokes it. That’s it. That’s the guy’s entire function in the film.

There’s also a stray cat that keeps sneaking into Gloria’s house. But not any old cat: A Sphynx cat, which is absurd. There’s no such thing as stray Sphynx cat, only Sphynx cats that have escaped from the home of a rich person. But I digress. The cat is supposed to represent . . .death, maybe? Because its form is so skeletal? (In another scene, Gloria literally watches a street puppeteer with a skeleton marionette.) Or maybe it’s supposed to represent our human need to connect with other living creatures? At first, Gloria hates the cat. Later, she warms up to it. Your guess is as good as mine.

So back to Arnold. He also has grown adult daughters who are completely dependent on him. They keep calling him and he’s expected to dote on them, accommodate their every whim, which he does. He’s not a bad guy but he has issues—possibly too many to overcome.

At one point, Arnold says that his children never worry about him. His job is to worry about them. This is a sort of interesting point that the film flirts with: The idea that parenthood changes us in a such a way we lose a bit of our own agency, our own personhood. The idea isn’t really explored, but it’s there, it’s something. And that’s kind of it. I was discussing the film with my film critic pal Tomris and she suggested that what I was looking for—meek middle aged woman finds her own voice and power—is a cliché. That what this film gives us—woman lives her life, we simply get to observe it—is more profound, more unusual, more challenging. Fair enough. But I never felt like I got to know Gloria well enough to even care about her journey from A to A, as it were. What was I supposed to want for her? Is wanting to want things for my heroine too pedestrian? Am I hopelessly bourgeois to want a character arc? In a final scene, as she sings along to the song Gloria—natch—the woman getting her groove on on the screen in front of me might as well have been a complete stranger.

How to properly describe the Icelandic film Woman At War? On the one hand, it’s a serious film about environmental activism and the scourge of climate change. But it’s also an action film, filled with actual scenes of dodging helicopters and drones and ducking in caves and crevices. It’s a feminist clarion call, with a middle-aged (!) female heroine who genuinely warrants the designation “badass.” It’s a realistic film that nonetheless flirts with elements of magic realism, absurdism, and whimsy. And oh yeah, if you squint hard enough, it even has a little romance.

That director Benedikt Erlingsson manages to balance all these elements in a way that is both wildly entertaining, light on its feet, and cohesive is a testament to his unique voice and skills. It also helps that his leading lady is the extraordinary Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir, who perfectly embodies the spirit of this hearty, no-nonsense, vigilante do-gooder.

Halla certainly doesn’t look like your typical eco-warrior. She’s a mild-mannered choir teacher who lives alone in an airy, plant-filled apartment. But look more closely and you’ll see clues—her walls are festooned with portraits of her heroes, including Nelson Mandela and Gandhi.

Some international manufacturing plant has opened in the quiet Icelandic village where she lives, belching toxic fumes out into the environment. Halla’s plan is simple: She’ll destroy power lines, cutting off electricity to the plant. She works stealthily and mostly alone: She has a rather twitchy and paranoid mole inside the Icelandic government who assists her. And she is also aided by a kindly farmer who takes a shining to her and even loans her a car (a teal blue vintage Volvo that I need in my life.)

The government and local media has spun the mysterious vigilante as a scary terrorist who is trying to sabotage Iceland’s economy. (In a running gag that is both funny and telling: an innocent Hispanic backpacker is constantly being mistaken for the terrorist.) Suddenly, she is being pursued by the police. But her bravery, ingenuity, and knowledge of the rugged terrain keeps her one step ahead of the law.

Everything changes—or potentially changes—when Halla finds out that an adoption form she filled out four years ago (and had long given up on) has come through: A tiny orphaned Ukrainian girl—in a picture, she looks up with sad, trusting eyes and clutches a bouquet of flowers—will soon be ready to become her daughter. Now she has a true dilemma: Keep up her underground work and risk going to jail or stop what she’s doing and allow her potential daughter to grow up in a world that is uninhabitable.

There are wonderful twists and surprises along the way, none of which I will spoil here. Suffice it to say, Woman at War had me gripped and delighted all the way through. And when it was over, I wanted to see more of Erlingsson and Geirharðsdóttir’s work—and immediately began planning a trip to Iceland.

Woman At War is now playing in D.C. and Bethesda and opens next week (3/22) in Baltimore.

The Oscar nominated Polish film Cold War is undeniably cool. Stunningly shot in black and white, it has beautiful, disaffected leads who lean against walls and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and perform in Parisian jazz clubs, often backlit by neon signs. But it can also be cool in that other sense—as in remote, inscrutable, emotionally detached.

The unfortunate thing about this sense of detachment is that the film is a love story—and not just any old love story, but a sweeping, decades-spanning romance that is meant to be imbued with unbridled passion. We are supposed to believe that musician Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and chanteuse Zula (Joanna Kulig) are madly in love—that they are each other’s one and only. But I confess I never got fully invested in their relationship. This is partly because they don’t say much to each other—they either have sex or gaze at each other from across rooms or bemoan the fact that they can’t be together. When they do talk, they often argue. The film’s (admittedly interesting) structure is also a hindrance to that emotional connection: Director Pawel Pawlikowski presents the film in brief chapters, jumping ahead in time, often by several years.

When we first meet Wiktor and Zula, it’s 1949 and we’re in the countryside of Poland, where Wiktor has received some sort of state grant to finance a passion project: taking the indigenous folk music of the villages of Poland and bringing it to large stages. Zula has auditioned to be one of the singers and dancers in Wiktor’s troupe and he is immediately mesmerized by her. She is a woman of mystery, with something of a dark past and, because of that, her place in the ensemble is somewhat precarious. Eventually, the two succumb to all those smoldering gazes and commence a secret romance. But everything changes when the officials funding Wiktor’s pet project insist he start playing patriotic music extoling Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. He decides to defect to Paris and implores Zula to go with him.

If Zula did, in fact, go with him, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. Instead, there are various misunderstandings and missed connections and the two remain apart. She stays in Poland while he develops a career as a composer and jazz musician in France. Over the years, they meet, have sex, argue. They commence other relationships, but never with great passion. Zula, however, can be quite jealous.

Cold War is meant to have a touch of The Gift of the Magi. The two lovers make sacrifices for each other, but often with unintended consequences. It’s a tragedy about the oppressiveness of the Soviet government, how it stifled creativity and humanity and, ultimately, love. It’s gorgeous to look at and, honestly, quite compelling from beginning to end. I just wish I felt more of the love.

Think about the main characters of films you recently viewed. How many of them were black women? How many had black female actresses as lead protagonists? How many were directed by black women? One or two may come to mind. Try to name 10. Are you having difficulty?

In response to the blatant inequity black women creatives face, filmmaker and writer Nia Hampton founded The Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival. The festival aims to promote dynamic cinematic efforts from Black female/femme identified filmmakers as well as “shake up the notoriously elitist culture of film festivals.”

This Sunday, January 20 at 5 p.m., the Creative Alliance will host “Taste Test: A Night of Short Films,” as a preview for the second installment of the festival, coming in the fall of 2019. Cinephiles can experience selections from Cuba, Brazil, South Africa, Canada and the United States that center “the black femme as a global protagonist.” A panel discussion with Hampton and some of the filmmakers will follow.

In 2018, the call for a more inclusive cinema grew too loud to ignore: more women and people of color as lead protagonists, directors, crew members, and writers. Hollywood’s decision to take heed proved to be incredibly profitable. Films like Black Panther, Mudbound, Bright, Moonlight, A Wrinkle in Time, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Get Out, among others, broke longstanding misconceptions about the earning potential of films with more people of color. The commercial success of those films set a new standard that has taken decades to acknowledge—national audiences will support great films even if they do not feature white male protagonists.

Despite these modest victories, inequitable casting and hiring of nonwhite actors and directors persists. UCLA’s recent research publication, 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report revealed that only one in 10 film directors are people of color and less than one out of 10 film directors are female. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film concludes that, of the top films in 2017, just 16 percent of female characters were black and only 7 percent were LatinX. DataUSA confirmed that more than 80 percent of American producers and directors are white, an overwhelming majority are male and just 7.78 percent are black.

With these disparities in mind, we chatted with Hampton about the importance of black women filmmakers, how she defines femme, and her hopes for the evolution of the festival.

The Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival is a powerful title. How are you defining femme?
Femme is such a loaded term because we know that not all women have female genitalia and that not all women describe themselves as feminine or feminist. A femme person knows that they are femme regardless of how they look or how others may perceive them. But I’m also thinking about feminine boys who had to fight. I’m thinking about dark-skinned black women, who had to overcompensate to be seen. I’m thinking about naturally black women, who aren’t comfortable with the way people treat them.

[The films] are presenting characters who may be seen as femme. The directors are women, most are black, but the idea is that what you are watching on screen is a femme-identified person, their experiences, and what they are going through.

Why do you believe that it is important to present narratives that center black femmes?
When it comes to Hollywood, those films are not enough for me. When I was young, I got to see women be protagonists and femme-identified folks be feminists, but I think some things still need to be changed. I loved Black Panther and I love that it was made. Letitia Wright and Lupita Nyong’o, their roles were great, but I want to see films just about them. I’m looking for more femme heroes and protagonists to watch. I also know a lot of black female filmmakers but feel like, if I’m not in New York or in film school, I don’t get to see their work. Film is such a male-centric medium. It’s easy to go to a film festival and not see women making films. As a female filmmaker, I need to know that other people are doing this as well.

“Taste Test” will show short films from different countries. I made a short that I shot in Brazil. The shorts all cover different subjects, different genres. We will continue to center films by and about black women or folks who are femme-identified.

How do you hope the festival will evolve?
I want to create something that is operated by regular people. I would like to see my film festival accessible to black women who are not necessarily filmmakers. A lot of film festival culture is tied up in classism and elitism. You usually have to have enough money to make a film and then sell it and that kind of cuts out many black women from jump. I would like to host workshops and networking opportunities and really be a community for people. I really want to make a space where people are interacting and making films and really be a part of the process.

Those of us born before a certain year remember the idle pleasure of browsing your local video store, hoping the newest release wasn’t sold out, discovering hidden gems on the shelves, and buying sour candy at the register.

The passionate film lovers who make up Baltimore Video Collective certainly share those sentiments, too, considering they joined forces after beloved store Video Americain closed in 2014. After an impressive Kickstarter campaign, support from people like John Waters and Beach House, and collecting 10,000 titles from various sources, BVC is ready to open its new nonprofit video rental store Beyond Video.

Located on Howard Street in Remington, Beyond Video is using the modern streaming service model and applying it to its collection of vintage and rare VHS tapes, Blu-rays, and DVDs—ranging from rom-coms to campy horror to cult classics. The store’s founders include Joe Tropea, Liz Donadio, Scott Braid, Dave Barresi, Greg Golinski, Albert Birney, Kevin Coelho, and Eric Hatch.

As they prepare to open their doors on Friday, we spoke with Hatch (formerly director of programming at the Maryland Film Festival) about his love of movies, the origins of the project, and what makes this all oh-so-Baltimore.

Where did your love of film first begin?
Ironically, I grew up without a TV in the house, but my dad was, and still is, a big fan of old Hollywood movies—Marx Brothers, Humphrey Bogart, that kind of stuff. I grew up in Columbia and he would take us up to the Senator, the Charles, and places in D.C. to see these old Hollywood movies. That sort of gave me the bug. In my late teens, he relented and we got a TV/VCR, but strictly so we could watch old movies.

How did that passion translate into the opening of a nonprofit video rental store in Remington?
Well, it’s really a collective of us. A group coalesced one by one as Video Americain started closing. Initially it was to see if we could literally keep the store open, but that wasn’t viable. So we kept meeting over the years, looking primarily for a sympathetic landlord who would let us open another space. This nonprofit video store started forming in our mind. Things took a turn for the better almost two years at this point when we were able to start renting this space on Howard Street.

I know you got a lot of support from the local community. What was it like to see that outpouring?
It was very heartening to see the response on Kickstarter. Our goal was $30,000 and we ended up exceeding it. Looking back, I think that just the right amount of time had passed after Video Americain had closed. It wasn’t just nostalgia, it was a palpable loss. The hardcore cinephiles who were looking for foreign, documentary, and experimental things, they weren’t finding what they wanted online. They realized they had a broader spectrum at the video store. And maybe they realized that they missed talking to the people that work there. Sometimes algorithms on Netflix are great, but they don’t compare to the real world.

Do you think the younger generation understands the appeal of a brick-and-mortar video store?
Honestly, it isn’t taking a lot of work to show a new generation this world. We’ve done a low-key, invite-only opening the last few weeks to make sure we remember how to run a video store. There’s a wide sector of people coming in. The overwhelming majority are either people old enough to remember video stores and younger people who’ve never been. I think that’s actually how culture works. I grew up in the 1980s, so I had a fascination with the ’60s and ’70s. Kids that grew up in the ’90s or 2000s, they’re fascinated with the generation right before them. It’s a window into something they couldn’t have experienced before.

Talk about the unique model of Beyond Video.
The payment system is similar to a streaming service. You set up a recurring donation and you pick one of two plans: $12 a month that gives you three items at a time or $20 where multiple people can have have six items at a time. Once you’ve set up that recurring donation, there are no rental fees or no late fees whatsoever unless you’ve smashed one of our DVDs [laughs]. You hear about projects like this from around the country, but mostly it’s venerable institutions the have shifted to nonprofit status. All of them were pre-existing stores and they use the old business model of pay-as-you-go. The fact we’re building it from scratch and have 10,000 titles is unique.

How did you build out your collection?
The initial period we were accepting donations and we had a social media presence. We would take any commercially issued tape, DVD, or Blu-ray. And then, as things got a bit more serious, we did the work of laying out the collection, scanning everything in and seeing what we had and didn’t have. It was sort of this mental game of identifying where the holes in the collection were. That was actually super fun. We created a shared Google Doc and people started sending items we were missing from that list. Even though there’s something old-school about a video store, we’re using all the best aspects of the internet like social media and crowdsourcing to make this happen. I got a great response from A24, Criterion, and other distributors, who gave us freebies or big discounts. They loved the video store era, too.

Any titles you’re especially excited about?
I myself donated from my collection a copy of my favorite movie Posession, a 1981 very over-the-top arthouse horror movie that is only available in a super expensive velvet box. We’ve also had a lot of people donate a ton of out-of-print titles. But we want to be a full-service store. We have two floors in our store, upstairs there’s one room organized by director and then there’s another that’s comedy, drama, horror, and romance and those are very well-stocked with a lot of recognizable films.

What’s in store for this weekend?
Friday is going to be our first day open to the public. We’re open just on weekends through December and going to scale up in January and February. We’re hoping eventually to be open four or five days a week. On Friday, no balloons or popcorn I don’t think, we’re just opening the doors to the general public for the first time. I’m sure this type of thing could happen in other cities, but this has had a very DIY spirit that reflects the Baltimore sensibility.

Before Maya Arulpragasam became the genre-bending rapper M.I.A., she dreamed of being a documentary filmmaker and hoped to chronicle narratives she rarely saw, like those of her family, Tamil people, and other marginalized communities.

Now, viewers can get a glimpse of that world with new documentary Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. by director Stephen Loveridge, which premieres at the Parkway Theatre on Friday, October 19. The film offers new insights about the life, trials, and activism of an artist whose sound ruled the early 2000s.

In the film, we learn that her father was a Sri Lankan revolutionary, a founding member in the Tamil Resistance Movement, a collective who fought against the genocide of the Tamil people. In 1995, when Maya was 10 years old, she and her family were forced to flee Sri Lanka, and emigrate to an immigrant ghetto in Britain. While there, Maya was exposed to struggles of other peoples and found a particular connection to the African-American experience through hip-hop and by reading anti-colonial literature from scholars like Frantz Fanon.

One of the highlights of the documentary is its inclusion of behind the scene footage of M.I.A. traveling around the world to gather sounds for her second album, Kala. In an effort to produce a truly global sound, M.I.A. worked with musicians in Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Jamaica, Central Africa and Black America, with significant time spent in Baltimore. One thing that always drew me to the soundscapes M.I.A. produced on Kala was the bass and meter it sourced from Baltimore Club. It is no surprise that Philadelphia-bred producer Diplo was highly influenced by Baltimore Club and reached out to legendary Baltimore-based producer Blaqstarr to work on cuts for M.I.A.’s second album, Kala. Tracks written and produced by Blaqstarr include “The Turn” and “World Town,” which incorporated elements from Blaqstarr’s classic banger, “Hands Up Thumbs Down.”

Music aside, the film’s recurrent theme is that of conflict—M.I.A.’s struggle to find balance between the privilege and ambivalence of celebrity, and her self-imposed responsibility to, like her father, use her platform as a vehicle to address devastating civil injustices in Sri Lanka. Family photographs, found footage, and documentary video shot by Maya, intercut with more recent footage by Loveridge, a longtime friend and early art school classmate, reveal the artist’s eminent failure to leverage her celebrity for the freedom of Tamil people and also maintain her celebrity.

Every culture has a caste system, an “othered” population that usually has a darker complexion, follows a religious system other than Christianity or a belief that is outside of the Abrahamic religious structure, or is a different ethnic group or class than the nations ruling class. The documentary reveals that, despite these global inequities, people, especially those from so-called first world nations, quickly forget that we are implicated by our avoidance to combat systemic inequalities.

In 2010, around the release of Maya, an album notoriously reviled for its visceral music video “Born Free,” which depicted the violence of genocide by using white, red-haired victims in place of people of color, M.I.A. went on a media tour to call out the Sri Lankan governments participation in the genocide of Tamil people. The response was anything but favorable. Major media outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian, among others, quickly mocked and discredited her motives. In many ways Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. seems to try to shift the narrative away from that gas lighting, and the perception that M.I.A. was merely an airheaded, unintellectual persona, towards a more realized and historically nuanced reflection, in the artist’s own words, about her journey to become M.I.A. and her persistent support for the freedom and protection of Tamil people.

The documentary is a slow burn that leaves a lasting impression about how quickly one’s politics can make them fall out of favor with popular culture.

The Sara Spencer Washington Story, a short documentary from Baltimore-raised, New York-based filmmaker Royston Scott, is one of nearly 100 films from 16 countries screening this week at the Fifth Annual Baltimore International Black Film Festival. Scott offers a compelling glimpse into the vast accomplishments of his grandmother, Sara Spencer Washington, one of the first African-American millionaires.

In 1920, Sara Spencer Washington, notably recognized as “The Madame,” founded Apex News and Hair Company, a black-owned-and-operated beauty brand empire. Apex capitalized on the absurdity of American segregation by targeting consumers white beauty brands refused to acknowledge. Apex advertisements centered around black aesthetics and showcased the style and humanity of African-American culture.

Washington was able to increase the wealth and prestige of Apex across the eastern seaboard while innumerable businesses collapsed during the Great Depression. Those earnings allowed for an ambitious expansion of the Apex brand. In less than a decade, she brokered many lucrative endeavors: Apex Beauty Colleges, beachfront resort Hotel Brigantine, Apex Country Course in Atlantic City, and various philanthropic initiatives. Celebrities of the era like Joe Lewis and Marian Anderson regularly graced the cover of Apex News. By the mid-1950s, the brand had employed and educated thousands of African Americans.

We spoke briefly with director Royston Scott about the incredible and inspiring story of Sara Spencer Washington and The Apex News and Hair Company.

This is a powerful documentary. What inspired you to tell her story?
When my mother passed away, I found in the basement all of these boxes of Apex memorabilia and scrap books. My mother had compiled scrapbooks of newspaper articles, and clippings of graduates in their caps and gowns, hundreds of Black women in caps and gowns from the 1930s and 40s. One whole book was D.C., another Baltimore, another Atlanta, Atlantic City. I realized if all these women graduated in this year, and all of the scrapbooks were by year, I was trying to figure out how many women had actually graduated and how many lives were affected.

What struck you about this particular story?

I really had a moment that brought me to tears realizing that my family history was so important and influential in affecting the lives of so many black women. This story is really important. I dug deeper into the boxes and found magazine that had promotional items and equipment that you could use in salons. I realized the magnitude of the business, which is something I never looked into as a kid.

And why turn this story into a documentary?

It’s something I looked into when I went to study at NYU to go to film school and acting. I thought it would be a great project. This is my first documentary. It’s definitely been a labor of love. My mother’s health took a turn for the worst right before I was about to interview her. Within a year she passed away. I lost with her passing firsthand knowledge of Apex and growing up with Sara Spencer Washington. She grew up as the Apex heiress, debutant and the face of Apex after The Madame passed away in 1953. It was a life-changing event for me. I realized my family’s history was so important and I realized I had the opportunity to do something about it as a filmmaker and documentary filmmaker.

What has it been like to see your work come to fruition?

Things are really going great and this has been such a rewarding experience. My colleague Jacob Burckhardt, who is the assistant producer, [has been] instrumental in helping me along with this. It took seven years to make this. It’s been a great learning experience all around. I know it means a lot to the people who see it. I really want the youth of today to know about their role models. That’s the great thing about making documentary films—you learn about role models and your history. I believe that people should be aware of their history.

The Sara Spencer Washington Documentary will screen this Thursday, October 4, at 12:30 p.m. at The Charles Theatre.

When Jed Dietz’s wife, Julia McMillan, retired as a full-time pediatrician and hospital administrator in 2016, he took a wait and see approach to her level of happiness.

“I was curious how that would work out. She really loved what she was doing,” says Dietz, the founding director of the Maryland Film Festival. “[But] it worked out great!” he notes, sounding vaguely surprised. Dietz said McMillan had more freedom for family and hobbies but was still able to sit on the American Board of Pediatrics and mentor former residents who came to town.

This got him thinking.

Now, two years later, Dietz, who turned 70 last January, is following in his wife’s footsteps.

Sandra L. Gibson, a nationally recognized leader in arts management and administration, will take over as interim director on November 1. From there, the board will launch a search for a new executive director.

“It’s a mashup of feelings,” Dietz admits. “I’m excited. And I’m nervous. I think I’m going to miss everything. I say that with full confidence that this is the right thing to do at the right time.”

The MFF had already begun a strategic planning campaign for 2019. Now finding Dietz’s permanent replacement will be part of those plans. Dietz hopes to be as involved—or uninvolved—as the board wants him to be.

He says he’ll remain a MFF board member (although he’ll likely recuse himself from the executive director search) and also continue to run the Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship, which nurtures rising talent.

“I want to do whatever it takes to keep the [MFF] going,” Dietz says. “But I also want to get out of peoples’ way.”

Dietz founded the Maryland Film Festival in 1999 and oversaw its growth into one of the most respected and beloved small festivals in the country. In May of 2017, the MFF opened the full-time Parkway Theatre, which shows independent and revival films and hosts film-related discussions and events.

Dietz, a true cinephile, plans on remaining a fixture at the Parkway. He also says he looks forward to buying his all-access pass to the yearly festival, which takes place every May. (Something tells me he’ll be able to score a comp pass.)

Beyond that? He has vague plans. He actually wants to attend more film festivals, but this time just as a civilian. Then maybe summers in Martha’s Vineyard? Or renting a villa in Tuscany? All options are on the table. Well, except for one.

“I hate golf,” Dietz says.

Visual Art

First Fridays Free Curatorial Tour: Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance
As part of a free series at the Baltimore Museum of Art, curators give tours of exhibitions they curated and explain the shows in further detail, providing rich insight into the artists and their work. This month, senior curator of contemporary art and department head Kristen Hileman will lead a group through the much-talked-about show Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance. Mokgosi explores race and gender through intimate yet larger-than-life portraits and paintings of domestic environments. Curatorial tour from 2-3 p.m. Aug. 3; the show remains up through Nov. 11. Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

We Are Everywhere: Travels of the African Diaspora
Photographer Schaun Champion will show images from Baltimore and around the world that represent the African diaspora in her exhibit We Are Everywhere: Travels of the African Diaspora at Ida B’s Table, a beloved Southern soul food restaurant in downtown. The show is part of the monthly series Necessary Tomorrows, created by resident curator Sharayna Christmas to feature work that complements the visit and mission of the restaurant. Opening reception and artist talk, 5-8 p.m. Aug. 7. Ida B’s Table, 235 Holliday St.

Counterweight
Sera Boeno, Cevahir Özdoğan, and Noa Heyne examine concrete as a material and as a gender—its cultural and sociological implications and history—in the show Counterweight. Artist talks, a printmaking/archiving workshop with Lebanese archivist and artist Celia Shaheenon (Sept. 9), and an exhibition catalogue release on Sept. 21 will accompany the show. Aug. 10-Sept. 21, opening reception from 7-10 p.m. Aug. 10. The Menial Collection, 243 W. Read St.

Music

Summer in the Squares: Symphony Number One
Pull up a chair (or blanket) for the finale of this season’s Summer in the Squares. Symphony Number One will perform at Mount Vernon Place for the free series of shows that bring the work of emerging composers to the stage alongside beloved pieces by classical greats. During this show, the Baltimore-based chamber orchestra will feature the Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” alongside new works and pop favorites. 7-8:30 p.m. Aug. 29, Mount Vernon Place, 699 Washington Place

Baltimore International Surf Music Showcase
Four instrumental surf acts from around the world will take the Ottobar stage this month for a totally tubular night. Headlining the show will be Surfer Joe, based in Italy and often called the “international surf ambassador.” The legendary California surf band The Volcanics, and Les Agamemnoz (France) will also perform alongside local surf rockers the Flying Faders. 8 p.m. Aug. 15. Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St.

Art/Sound/Now: Suldano Abdiruhman and The Compositions
In collaboration with the High Zero Foundation, The Walters Art Museum will present its annual ART/SOUND/NOW, featuring artists creating soundscapes throughout the museum’s various gallery spaces. This year’s event highlights work by interdisciplinary artist Suldano Abdiruhman, a member of the artist collective BALTI GURLS and cofounder of 4c Gallery. 7-8:30 p.m. Aug. 23. The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St.

Film

High Fidelity / Empire Records Double Feature
When a beloved music shop in Baltimore turns 25, a nostalgic screening of two cults classics is in order. The Sound Garden was born in 1993, and shortly thereafter, the films Empire Records and High Fidelity were released—in 1995 and 2000, respectively—both set amid the backdrop of record stores. And if watching these back-to-back on the big screen weren’t nostalgic enough, please note they’ll be screened on 35mm. 7-11 p.m. Aug. 30. The SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Theater

Variations on Sacrifice
Rapid Lemon Productions will present its annual Variations Project this summer with Variations on Sacrifice. Eleven 10-minute plays by local authors will premiere during two weeks, followed by a third week (new this year) of staged readings of eight additional plays. Audiences of 2017’s Variations on Magic voted to select this year’s theme, Sacrifice. Plays, Aug. 3-12; staged readings, Aug. 16-19. Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St.

Literary Arts

‘Sentiments’ by Press Press: Baltimore Book Launch
What could be better than a summertime potluck? A summertime potluck hosted by Press Press, with readings to satiate your palate. The launch of “Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage,” the latest publication by Press Press, will feature readings about creating sanctuary, by Bilphena Yahwon, Rami Karim, and others, beginning at 5 p.m., plus a reading of “Manifesto for Sanctuary-Building & Sanctuary-Keeping.” Bring along a snack or something to grill at this community potluck of Baltimore creatives. 3-7 p.m. Aug. 11. Press Press, 427 N. Eutaw St.

Miscellanea

Comedy, Music and Poetry Showcase with Heda Rose and Guests
A lineup of Baltimore talent will take the Motor House stage for an evening of poetry, standup comedy, and music, headlined by vocalist, songwriter, actress, model, activist, and film producer Heda Rose. The remaining lineup includes comedian Larry Lancaster, comedian Ebony “Miz Jaxxxn” Jackson, comedian Ray Diva, and poet Gradalove. Heda will perform a comedy set and music set with a live band. 8-11 p.m. Aug. 31. The Motor House, 120 W. North Ave.

Fluid Movement’s ‘The Water Ballet’
The Baltimore-based performance art group Fluid Movement channels the master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock for its latest production, “The Water Ballet” at Patterson Park. Take a deep dive into all that horrifies you. Day and night shows, Aug. 3-5. Patterson Park.

Betty Davis is a legend.

If you know who she is.

The revolutionary psychedelic-funk singer, affectionately known as the “Queen of Funk” in 1960s and ’70s Greenwich Village, put out three solo albums and radically changed music history. She wooed Miles Davis—marrying him, introducing him to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, altering his musical direction—then left him within a year. She exploded on the scene . . . and then pretty much disappeared for more than three decades.

In the 2017 documentary Betty: They Say I’m Different, the title of which is named after one of her studio albums, she resurfaces in Pittsburgh 35 years after vanishing from the spotlight. We hear her making a telephone call in the film’s trailer: “After all this time,” she says, “I’m ready to tell my story.”

WTMD will host the Maryland premiere of the film on June 28 at the WTMD studio in Towson. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. for the free event, and the film starts at 8.

“She was an enigma,” says WTMD general manager and program director Scott Mullins, who curates the film series there. A funk and soul DJ who has hosted WTMD’s Dirty Soul Party for nearly 20 years, Mullins found her as a record collector, “just digging through old 45s—crate digging, as we call it.”

Her records were out of print for 40 years, and they became highly coveted as funk and soul DJs discovered them recently, elevating her to cult figure status as a radical pioneer of black women’s music.

“As her reputation grew, I think that sparked the filmmakers,” Mullins says. “Now she’s in the limelight again because of this growing interest in her music. It’s a classic case of an artist ahead of her time. She was too hard-edge, too out-there. Her voice, the music, the production—it’s really hard-hitting, edgy, deep funk.”

From those early recordings, Davis has gone on to influence contemporary artists up through today, Macy Gray and Erykah Badu among them. The documentary has been screened in a handful of places in the U.S., and WTMD staff is psyched to be able to provide a free screening for the film’s Maryland premiere.

“It coincides with our mission,” Mullins says. “These artists deserve to be heard.”

A little boy, prompted by his schoolteacher, dreams of what he’ll become when he grows up. Another young boy has a pet rooster who he wants to train to become a fighting cock. And an aging farmer living in the hills of Haiti teaches the practical and spiritual value of the machete.

Stories of Afro-Caribbean people will be in full bloom at 7 p.m. tonight in a series of seven film shorts that will be screened at the Motor House as part of the continuing FESPACO West Film Series, presented by the Baltimore-based Nilewater Multimedia.

Each installment of the series focuses on a different geographical area. The first one, held in January, showcased black Brazilian films. Upcoming is a fest of Black American films.

The festivals were created in an effort to bring awareness to the U.S. of films screened at the major biannual Pan-African film festival FESPACO, held in Burkina Faso, which draws people from across the world. The festival turns 50 this year.

Nilewater worked with the Caribbean Film Academy to select films specifically for a Baltimore audience.

Omar Akbar, founder and CEO of Nilewater and Cultural Ambassador to Burkina Faso, says the satellite fest in Baltimore and a couple other U.S. cities helps to make FESPACO films accessible in the West. For future events, he hopes to bring artists from the Western Hemisphere to the states to perform in conjunction with the mini fests.

Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Martinique, Barbados, and Curaçao will all be featured in cinema, and a Q&A will follow with the event host.

The marvelous Maryland Film Festival is back tonight (through May 6). Here’s a great chat I had with festival director Jed Dietz and filmmaker Matt Porterfield. And below are capsule reviews of a few of the titles playing at the fest, including Porterfield’s Sollers Point.

SOLLERS POINT
3.5 stars

Sollers Point might be local auteur Matt Porterfield’s most commercial film to date, while still retaining his astonishingly lived-in sense of working class Baltimore. Our hero is 26-year-old Keith (McCaul Lombardi), sweet, but not too bright, and handsome in a coiled, dirt-bag kind of way. He’s just out of Jessup and, after 9 months of house-arrest, is trying to stay clean, but forces are conspiring against him. All around, he encounters his past: disappointed loved ones and relatives, pissed off ex-girlfriends, gang-bangers who want him back in the fold. And he’s a master at self-sabotage, too, always seeming to take the wrong path when life offers him a crossroads. Lombardi plays Keith as taciturn, wary, and wounded. You sense the futility in rooting for him, but you do all the same.

WE THE ANIMALS
3 stars
 

Jeremiah Zagar’s dreamy coming of age film, based on Justin Torres’ semi-autobiographical novel, casts a hypnotic spell. In upstate New York, three young brothers are so close, they almost breathe as one. They all look alike—loose-limbed and shirtless, with matching dark-haired crew cuts—and they run free through their ramshackle house and neighborhood. All three brothers are rowdy and spirited, but the youngest, 10-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado), is the most sensitive. He’s an artist and a worrier and he’s slowly coming to terms with his queer identity. Life at home can be volatile, as the boys’ father (Raúl Castill), while loving, has a dark temper and is prone to bouts of self-pity; their mother (Sheila Vand) yearns to escape. Throughout, Jonah cautiously observes it all, concerned for his brothers and wondering what his own future holds.
 

MADELINE’S MADELINE
3.5 stars
 

It’s hard to properly describe Josephine Decker’s Madeline Madeline. If I were to merely recount the plot—a troubled but brilliant girl gets deeply involved with a cult-like experimental theater troupe, much to the consternation of her mother—it would sound almost conventional, but it’s anything but. Instead, Decker combines dream-like imagery, improvisation, and even some elements of horror to create a thoroughly singular cinematic experience. Molly Parker, as the charismatic but exploitative director of the troupe, and Miranda July, as the overly protective mother (they are presented as unwitting doppelgangers of each other) are both wonderful. But it’s newcomer Helena Howard, as Madeline, who gives an utterly mesmerizing, star-making performance.

WOBBLE PALACE
2.5 stars
 

“They say we’re a generation of narcissists,” says Jane (Dash Nekrasova), one half of the doomed couple explored in the amusing but cringe-y Wobble Palace. “But it’s not like we have anything else besides student debt and front facing cameras.”

Jane and her boyfriend, Eugene (Eugene Kotlyarenko), are trying one last-ditch experiment to possibly save their relationship—they’re splitting up the apartment they share for the weekend (Eugene gets Saturday and Jane gets Sunday).

The film starts from the perspective of Eugene, a self-styled weirdo who wears an elaborate man bun/combover hybrid that he calls the “floating toupee.” He immediately logs onto Tinder and tries, ineptly, to romance a series of women. Eugene calls himself a nice guy, and maybe he is, but his desperation to get laid comes off as creepy.

Next we see things through the eyes of Jane, who is only marginally more appealing than her oddball beau. At least she seems to have some moderate talent as an artist—she decorated the couple’s aggressively quirky apartment (think Astroturf and baby doll heads). But she frets the whole film about whether or not she’s “basic” and is rather cruel to Eugene.

Wobble Palace, which Kotlyarenko directed and co-wrote with Nekrasova, is very much of its moment, almost to a fault. At times the film feels rather explicitly anthropological, like a treatise—albeit a funny one—on millennial narcissism in the mid-2010s. (Look for already outdated phrases like “Bernie Bro,” “cuck,” and “basic bitch”!)

Still, young audiences will recognize themselves and their friends and be amused. It’s hard not to laugh at these characters, but a little harder to care about them.   
 

SICKIES MAKING FILMS
3 stars
 
 

This stylish documentary, from local filmmaker Joe Tropea, chronicles the history of film censorship with a particularly close look at Maryland’s own censorship board, the longest-operating in the country. Of course, it was doubly ironic that Maryland, home of that infant terrible of cinema, John Waters, would have the most draconian such board, but it was kept alive by my many factors including one particularly colorful censor, Mary Avara, a true Baltimore character who made the national talk show rounds.

You’ll learn a lot watchng this film—for example, it was progressives who were the first to call for film censorship, in the name of protecting children and serving the greater good (eventually, that ground was ceded to conservatives, and in particular, the Catholic church). And you’ll see that Marylanders were largely embarrassed by the censorship board, which literally cut the naughty bits out of films all the way up until 1981. Tropea keeps things lively by deploying a combination of talking head interviews (including film historians, theater owners, politicians, and Waters himself), old film and TV footage, original illustrations, and the kind of kitschy tableaus of documents, pens, and clippings that would make Wes Anderson proud. In the end, the censorship board was shuttered due to indifference more than anything else.

“The lesson of the history of censorship is that it doesn’t work,” says former Maryland State Senator Howard Denis, who introduced the bill to abolish the censor board. “ . . . You really cannot censor art. Art will have a way of expressing itself.”

Visual Art

Devin Allen’s A Beautiful Ghetto exhibit
Baltimore street photographer Devin Allen became known across the nation for his work after one of his images of the 2015 Baltimore protests was featured as the cover of Time magazine. Three years later, and in honor of that anniversary, the Institute for Integrative Health will exhibit a series of his black-and-white photos documenting the riots in A Beautiful Ghetto. Maybe more importantly, the show will serve as a launchpad for community-wide discussions. This kicks off with an artist talk during the opening reception, where his 2017 book by the same title will be available, and it continues with various events with a focus on healing, such as the April 13 dialogue with artists, writers, and leaders about creating healing spaces for their communities. The Institute for Integrative Health, 1407 Fleet St. Opening reception: 6 to 8:30 p.m. March 15.

Adam Davies: Reroutings
Creative Alliance resident artist Adam Davies will transform the space there to bring us Reroutings, an exhibit of his large-format film photographs of outdoor structures that have served as unofficial public forums (think graffiti-strewn bridges and unexpected street art found during a stroll). The gallery space will be completely darkened and the walls painted black and replaced with his huge (56- by 70-inch) photographic images, which will be lit from behind. Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches will perform his lo-fi electronica soundscapes—which were an influence on the photography series—during an opening reception on March 10, and more events will follow. Opens March 10 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning
Story quilts are an African-American tradition dating back at least some 200 years. Some historians believe that secret codes were sewn into quilts, providing maps for navigating the Underground Railroad. Baltimore artist Stephen Towns continues in this tradition, exploring themes of slavery and perspectives of women and people of color through his large-scale fabric and bead-work pieces, often featuring faceless black figures that appear as silhouettes. The Baltimore Museum of Art will exhibit 10 of his quilts in Rumination and a Reckoning beginning this month, seven of which depict the story of Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion. As if that weren’t enough, the museum will host Towns in conversation with internationally renowned artist Mark Bradford. March 7 through Sept. 2 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Music

Baltimore Plays The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill 20th Anniversary
Hard as it may be to believe, it’s been 20 years since the release of the seminal album The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill. In a homage to the work, several artists—Jasmine Pope (J Pope and the HearNow), Christen B, Joy Postell, Karin Sings Evans, Marc Avon Evans, Jamaal Black Root Collier—will gather at the Creative Alliance to perform its tracks in their own style. March 18 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Theater

Humbug: The Great P.T. Barnum Séance
Magician David London will attempt to summon the spirit of The Great P.T. Barnum via—what else?—séance in his new show Humbug at The Peale Center. While we can’t guarantee audiences will make contact with the legendary showman, we do guarantee the exhibition of genuine Barnum artifacts (honestly, that might be a hoax, too—in the spirit of P.T. Barnum, of course). March 8 to 25 at The Peale Center, 225 N. Holliday St.

Film

Everything is Terrible!’s The Great Satan
Imagine being able to get a taste of more than more than 2,000 horror, satanic, and religious films in under two hours. You don’t have to imagine anymore. Everything is Terrible! has done the work for you, creating a narrative from scraps of material to make the kitschy, trippy new film The Great Satan. In their own words: “Since the dawn of time, man has searched for answers . . . and failed. But the fog of existence has finally cleared thanks to the eternal fruits of your favorite found footage collective.” The makers will be at the theater to present their film as part of their cross-country tour. Guests are encouraged to bring offerings of VHS tapes of Jerry Maguire. March 7 at SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Kékszakállú

Baltimore’s Matt Porterfield, best known for his films Hamilton and Putty Hill, will host and do a Q&A at two screenings of the gorgeous Argentine film Kékszakállú, co-written and co-produced by him and directed by Gastón Solnicki. The coming-of-age film’s title and inspiration comes from the opera Bluebeard’s Castle and follows a group of upper-class girls as they enter the world outside of their privileged lives. March 2 to 8 at SNF Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave.

Literary Arts

An Evening with Laura Lippman at Federal Hill Prep School
Baltimore’s literary darling and New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman will be at Federal Hill Prep School as part of a book tour for her latest release, Sunburn. The novel tells the story of Polly, a runaway wife who’s ready to start a new life but wasn’t quite ready to fall in love in the process. March 24 at Federal Hill Preparatory School, 1040 William St.

Visual Art

Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans
Photographer Terrence A. Reese’s career has led him to take portraits of such stars as Lauryn Hill and George Clinton. The artist, who goes by TAR, will exhibit a selection of his work at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum this month in the show Reflections: Intimate Portraits of Iconic African Americans. Black-and-white images will depict such luminaries as the Nicholas Brothers and Gordon Parks in their natural environments and living spaces so as to better reflect who they are, through their personal objects, style, and the context of their lives. Wednesdays through Sundays, Feb. 1 through Aug. 12, at Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Artist talk with Shirin Neshat
Iranian artist Shirin Neshat explores gender, identity, and politics in her work, as well as the differences in culture between the West and Muslim countries. Because she tackles such complex themes, there is no shortage of questions and discussion surrounding her work. It also makes her a perfect candidate for MICA’s Mixed Media lecture series, which brings to Baltimore artists from across the globe. For this installment, Neshat will be in conversation with Baltimore Museum of Art Director Christopher Bedford. 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Falvey Hall, Brown Center, 1301 W. Mount  Mount Royal Ave.

Music

Charm City Django Jazz Fest
Nothing like some live gypsy jazz to add a little heat to a cold winter’s day. Creative Alliance has got us covered with not one but three days of its annual Charm City Django Jazz Fest, which will bring in acts from across the region and world, including headliner Samson Schmiit, a legendary Manouche gypsy guitarist from France. Swing on by to see Sara L’abriola, Ultrafaux, ‘Nuff Said, and others, to experience a range of styles within the genre. Feb. 23 to 25 at the Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Out of Darkness: Two Remain
A new opera looks at what you might consider atypical Holocaust survivors: one, a political prisoner, and the other a homosexual Protestant, both of whom used words to overcome the traumas of captivity during the war. World-renowned composer Jake Heggie developed the two-act opera based on the true stories of these characters who “survive through their poetry,” says Garnett Bruce, stage director of the Peabody Chamber Opera’s production of the piece. Feb. 8 through 11 at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. The composer and librettist will attend opening night, with a talk following the show.

Theater

Constellations & Crossroads
Constellations & Crossroads is a theatrical double-header steeped in American history and exploding with life. Baltimore Rock Opera Society partnered with Arena Players, Baltimore’s historic African-American community theater, to present two short musicals in their entirety, backed by a live band. The Determination of Azimuth tells the story of Katherine Johnson, a black mathematician who worked for NASA and was responsible for comp[uting paths for rocket ships sent into space. Battle of Blue Apple Crossing leans more on fiction to tell the tale of blues legend Robert Johnson, said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical ability. The score follows America’s musical heritage from field spirituals to rock ’n’ roll to garage rock. 8 p.m. Feb. 9 through 18 at Arena Players’ venue at 801 McCulloh St.

All She Must Possess
The Rep Stage premiere of All She Must Possess tells the story of Baltimore’s famed Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, extravagant world travelers and collectors of art and curios. During the early 20th century, they stored thousands of paintings—including work by Matisse and Picasso, among other greats—in their homes, amassing what would become one of the world’s largest collections of modern art (a large portion would eventually be housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is today). In the theatrical version of their lives, written by University of Maryland Baltimore County professor Susan McCully and directed by Rep Stage artistic director Joseph W. Ritsch, paintings come to life and Gertrude Stein—Etta’s lover—makes an appearance. Coinciding with the play is an exhibition of historical women’s clothing from the Cone sisters’ time, on display at Howard Community College’s Rouse Company Foundation Gallery through March 11. The play runs Feb. 8 to 25 at Rep Stage at Howard Community College.

Dance

The Community Project
Each year, The Collective pulls together dancers from the community and pairs them with a professional choreographer to develop the Community Project performance. This year, 22 dancers—ranging in age from teens to baby boomers and across all skill levels—met on several cold January weekends to rehearse under dancer Caitlin McAfee for this year’s show, which is but one component to the Baltimore Dance Invitational. Set to Indian Wells’ song “Cascades,” the group will show through movement how the mind races, gets distracted, and follows its own trails of thought. Gordon Center for Performing Arts on Thursday, February 15, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Gordon Center for Performing Arts, 3506 Gwynnbrook Ave., Owings Mills. 

Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party: Round 2
The Ottobar event flier states it best: “Are you ‘Drunk In Love’ or ‘Drunk On Love’?!” At the Beyonce vs Rihanna Dance Party, that is precisely the question. And also, are you ready to duke it out—through dance, of course, to support your diva de jour. The dance party battle will light up with Beyonce tracks from DJ Mills and Rihanna tracks from Ottobar owner Craig Boarman. 9 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Ottobar, 2549 N. Howard St.

Miscellanea

African-American Arts Festival
The University of Baltimore helps us to celebrate Black History Month specifically through art at its annual African-American Arts Festival. Its offerings span an array of artistic mediums: film, visual art, music, theater. Some highlights: a panel with Black Ladies Brunch Crew of D.C., an African drumming circle, readings of Langston Hughes poetry spliced with live, improvised jazz piano, and a screening of Jonathan Demme’s film of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Feb. 15 to 18 at the University of Baltimore, 1420 N. Charles St.

Exhibit of Original Costumes

We may be 2,500 miles from Hollywood, but John Klisavage brings us a touch of its wonder by way of costume. At his bookstore in Havre De Grace, he’s displaying several outfits worn in major motion pictures, including Hunger Games and The Notebook. February and March at Washington Street Books & Music, 131 N. Washington St., Havre De Grace.

A culinary documentary on Basque cuisine
Parkway Theater has teamed up with a local restaurant to bring a food and film pairing, naturally. After a screening of The Txoko Experience: The Secret Culinary Space of The Basques, scriptwriter Marcela Garces and director Yuri Morejon will answer any questions the audience has, and then . . . everyone can partake in the food portion of the evening: passed pintxos from the Basque-inspired La Cuchara restaurant. Renowned Basque chefs serve as narrators of the culinary documentary, which explores Txokos, groups of people who gather to explore innovative and experimental ways of cooking. As Morejon puts it, “Txokos represent a distinctive, albeit enigmatic element of Basque gastronomy. As the private temples of traditional Basque cuisine, they captivate people with their warmth, ambiance, and great respect for fresh products.” 7 p.m. Feb. 22 Parkway Theater, 5 W. North Ave.

MICA professors, mixed media filmmakers, and seriously cute married couple Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata got some lovely news on Tuesday when their short animated film, Negative Space, was nominated for an Oscar. They even managed to capture the happy moment on Instagram (see below). We caught up with the (still slightly overwhelmed) couple via email, shortly after the nomination.
 

I saw that you filmed your reaction to the nom on Instagram. It was adorable. How’d you come up with that idea?

Max: To be honest, I usually prefer to be behind the camera, rather than the front. We were advised by an Academy affiliated distributor to film our reaction and Ru made me do it.
 

Ru: I was very happy we filmed it because I’ve never seen Max react like this in the 11 years we’ve been married. 
 

Did you get any sleep the night before the nominations?
Ru: Max rarely sleeps before anything important. I always sleep 7-8 hours, no matter what.   

What’s today been like for you? Phone ringing off the hook?
Max: It’s been a moving experience to get messages from family, friends and people who have been following our work for years.  

Ru: I’ve been on the phone/Skype/email with Japanese press for a full two days. I wasn’t expecting this and it came as a big surprise. I’ve been getting messages from Japan that people keep seeing my face and name on the morning news and evening news. I’ve always been inspired by Japanese people “making it” abroad, and this was the moment that I realized I became one of them. I’m beaming with pride!  

Other than possibly winning, what are you most anticipating about the show?
Ru: Both of us are excited that Agnès Varda is nominated [for her whimsical documentary Faces Places]. She’s an artist who has been true to herself for so many years and we both admire her courage.   

How does it feel to be in the same category as Kobe Bryant, whose short film Dear Basketball was also nominated?
Max: Animation (making) and basketball (watching) are my two favorite things. I’m excited that I might get to meet Glen Keane, the legendary animator who directed the film. It’s strange to see Kobe Bryant’s film advertised on basketball websites and talk shows, but I hope this will bring more attention to the animation arts.  

How can people see your movie?

Max: In Baltimore, Negative Space will be playing at the Parkway Theater on January 30th as part of the Sweaty Eyeballs Presents: Best of Ottawa International Animation Festival program. Starting in early February, the film will be in theaters all over the country with other nominees.

Negative Space was made possible through French production companies Ikki Films and Manuel Cam Studio, with the generosity of French funding. You can check out some of Max and Ru’s work over at TinyInventions.com

Picturing Prince

Steve Parke (Cassell Illustrated) 

No matter what musical style you favor, you have to admit it: There will never be another like Prince Rogers Nelson. The high heel-wearing, guitar-shredding icon cemented himself in a category all his own, transcending musical styles and breaking all the rules. Baltimore artist Steve Parke was along for the ride, capturing Prince at the height of his fame. And that story, which Parke details in a new book that is part memoir, part photographic portrait, is as extraordinary as any of the myths surrounding Prince. Parke had worked for Prince for nearly a decade as an artist, designing tour T-shirts and even an album cover, when, in 1997, the Purple One asked him if he could use a camera. What followed were years of images that captured The Artist with an intimacy never before seen. (Where else can you see Prince shooting hoops wearing a belly chain?) Paired with Parke’s remembrances that are at times poignant, at others hilarious (like a story about Prince’s reaction to George Clinton eating fried chicken), Picturing Prince is an entertaining tribute that will keep Prince’s spirit alive for generations to come.

Talking Pictures: How To Watch Movies

Ann Hornaday (Basic Books)

Ann Hornaday says upfront that she isn’t your typical cinephile. The longtime Washington Post film critic details in her new book that her arrival at her chosen career path was not exactly intentional—after working as Gloria Steinem’s assistant at Ms. Magazine and writing film-related stories for The New York Times, she got her first critic’s job at the Austin American Statesman. But, she argues, the fact that she’s something of a self-taught cinephile might be exactly the reason she’s an ideal authority to help us decide what makes a film good. She breaks down movies by their structural components—starting with the screenplay, detailing cinematography and editing, and ending with directing. She enlightens us with her expertise and entertains us with her sometimes surprising anecdotes and opinions (for instance, that Nicholas Cage is our generation’s Bertolt Brecht for embracing the artifice of acting with his outsized portrayals). Talking Pictures is as fun to read as it is informative. And trust us—you’ll never watch a movie the same way again.

For Scott Braid, the love of film began with his childhood video stores. Growing up in Perry Hall, the lifelong Baltimorean had a weekly ritual: scour the shelves, explore the horror section, and take chances on movies he’d never heard of. 

Years later, in 2000, he got a job at the eclectic Video Americain in Roland Park that cemented his fascination with cinema. He worked there for 10 years and claims to have learned more at the store than during his time at film school.

Eventually, Video Americain started to struggle, ultimately closing in 2014, at which point Braid joined forces with fellow Maryland Film Festival staffer Eric Hatch to form the Baltimore Video Collective. Now, with five other members, BVC plans to bring nostalgia back to Baltimore with Beyond Video, their own nonprofit video rental. Thanks to a push from Kickstarter, the store is set to open on Howard Street this fall. 

“Working in a video store taught me so much about both film culture and people,” says Braid. “They are places to share ideas, make friends, and learn.”

Beyond Video will feature everything from vintage and rare VHS tapes to Blu-rays and DVDs, ranging from rom-coms to cult classics with an overall goal of 10,000 titles. They also plan to include screenings, discussions, and workshops at this long-incubated project. 

“We want it to be more than just a video store,” says Braid. “We want it to be a community gathering space and resource.”

With such a diverse collection, BVC hopes to provide the kind of personal experience that streaming services can’t. 

“Like bookstores and record stores, video stores give people a browsing experience unlike anything online,” says Hatch. “There are films that were life-changing to me that I only encountered because video-store employees put them on the ‘house favorites’ wall. We want film-lovers old and new to have these experiences, and make these kinds of discoveries again.”

The early 1980s was a tumultuous time in Baltimore—and paralleled what was happening in a lot of other American cities. Drugs were running rampant, the public health and school systems were failing, and Bethlehem Steel closed down, causing thousands of people to lose their jobs.

But there was a group of young men that found success on the hardwood court of Dunbar High School, and it wasn’t thanks to a big budget or even a proper training center. Despite all odds, they became the greatest high school basketball team of all time. On Tuesday night at 8 p.m., ESPN will air Baltimore Boys as part of its popular “30 for 30” series and chronicle the tale of the Dunbar Poets both on and off the court.

“The best documentaries lead you to an unexpected place,” says co-director and Park Heights native Sheldon Candis. “You think it’s about this great basketball story, which it is, but it also holds a mirror up to American society in the 1980s.”

Candis, 38, said that he’s been waiting a long time to tell this story. The film opens up showing the 1968 riots in Baltimore following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and chronicles the triumphant journey of the Dunbar High School boys basketball team, who went undefeated for 59 straight games between 1981 and 1983. Even more impressive, 11 of the players joined a Division I program and four of those—David Wingate, Reggie Williams, Tyrone “Muggsy” Bogues, and Reggie Lewis—were drafted into the NBA.

“This is really my love letter to the city,” Candis said. “Growing up, we didn’t have to look to Michael Jordan. We had the Poets right in our own backyard.”

Wrangling up former players, family, and supporters of the team presented quite a few challenges, as did finding quality archive footage since the early ’80s was right on the cusp of the handheld video camera. Luckily, two other local filmmakers, Tommy Polley and David Manigault, made a Poets documentary a few years back and had already scoured East Coast news stations to find footage.

“There would be so many moments that people would describe to me or remember in their heads,” Candis said. “But trying to match up and find that footage was a challenging scavenger hunt.”

Shot over a five-month period last year, Baltimore Boys provides some behind the scenes moments from players like Bogues (“he reached genius on the hardwood,” Candis said) to Dunbar coach Bob Wade, who was instrumental in not only coaching, but nurturing his team. At one point, Wade reveals in the documentary that, because his team didn’t have a proper facility or weights, he drove around Baltimore City collecting bricks and had his team practice running with them.

“You better believe that’s why they were the most well-conditioned team in the fourth quarter,” Candis said. “One man’s junk became another man’s treasure.”

As a filmmaker, Candis admits that seeing Coach Wade get emotional during an interview was a highlight for him. The moment comes when he’s talking about having the Dunbar court dedicated to him and he started thinking about every player he coached, fathered, and protected during those years.

“It’s Bob Wade who is the unsung hero that everyone should really rally behind,” Candis said. “I am just some kid from Park Heights that has been lucky enough to share this story with a wider national audience. It’s about time.”