Winner of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent, Dear White People is a sly, provocative and often laugh-out-loud funny satire of race relations in the age of Obama.
At prestigious Winchester University, biracial student Samantha White begins her radio show, “Dear White People, the amount of black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man, Tyrone, doesn’t count.” Sam becomes president of the all-black residential hall Parker/Armstrong, whose existence is facing extinction in the name of diversification. TV reality show Black Face/White Place smells gold in Sam’s story and decides to follow it, rejecting the proposal of fellow black student Coco Conners, who pitched her show Doing Time at an Ivy League. The clamor over Sam’s rise also becomes a career-defining opportunity for black misfit Lionel Higgins when he is asked to join the school’s all-white newspaper staff to cover the controversy, even though he secretly knows little about black culture. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, writer/director Justin Simien makes an auspicious debut with Dear White People, a witty and whip-smart examination of black militancy, post-racial fantasies and the commodification of blackness. Nothing is black and white in this playful portrait of race in contemporary America. (Dir. by Justin Simien, 2014, USA, 108 mins., Rated R)
Coming to the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway on November 7, 2014.
At a recent Ward 6 forum about inclusion & equality in Tucson, several Black American audience members said that what happened in Ferguson, Missouri could happen here. Find out from this satiric film what it’s like to be a “black face in a white place.”
Dear white people: go see this powerful, funny movie that addresses bi-racialness, racism, “black face” Halloween parties, all black student dorms in a white college, the experience of “being a black face in a white place”. Witty lines abound in this movie (which I just saw along w/ 5 white people): “release your inner Negro”, “drowning in a sea of white”, etc. Coincidentally before the movie a white woman in the seat in front of me mistook me for another Asian woman she knew at TUSD, so I replied “We Asians all look alike”. But not all Blacks look (or act) alike in this film.One black actress even says in the film that white people are jealous of black people. Playing at the Loft till Thursday of next week.