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 | Music+Arts Mixed Films Bookend Hollywood Film Festival Posted June 5, 2009 Music+Arts has been busy this past year mixing a number of notable film projects, including the recent MTV-aired hit Memphis music series, $5 Cover. In addition, our studio has done sound mixing for two feature length independent films, the multi-award-winning Gospel Hill and the just completed Memphis location film N-Secure. Though $5 Cover may have gotten the bulk of the early publicity, it's the latter two that are in the spotlight this week. This week marked the beginning of the Hollywood Black Film Festival at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills and both Gospel Hill and N-Secure played a significant role in the schedule. The Festival opened on Tuesday night with Giancarlo Esposito's Gospel Hill, a passionately told story about a black neighborhood in Julia, South Carolina, where residents are faced with losing their homes to make way for a multimillion-dollar golf course development, stars Danny Glover, Angela Bassett, Julia Stiles, Giancarlo Esposito, Taylor Kitsch, Tom Bower, RZA and Nia Long. In the film, Danny Glover gives a subdued performance as John Malcolm, the son of assassinated civil rights activist Peter Malcolm (Samuel L. Jackson), whose unsolved murder left Gospel Hill reeling. Now 30 years later, John is withdrawn and his feelings are affecting his marriage to Sarah (Angela Bassett). His wife, a community activist, fruitlessly begs for his support in her campaign to stop the developers. To make matters worse, Sarah befriends the town's new schoolteacher Rosie (Julia Stiles), whose budding romance with Joel (Taylor Kitsch), the son of the town's notoriously bigoted sheriff, has thrust her into the center of attention. The Film Festival is set to close on Sunday with the debut screening of N-Secure, a film from Memphian Julius Lewis that follows a man's fall from the pinnacle of success into the depths of his damaged character. Carefully hidden insecurities are driven from the shadows of his soul and ultimately brought to light by a woman's betrayal. Once loosed, jealousy and paranoia grip him and drag him inexorably towards his utter ruin. Click here to visit the official N-Secure website and see the trailer. The Hollywood Black Film Festival (HBFF), dubbed "The Black Sundance," is an annual 6-day celebration of black cinema drawing together established and rising filmmakers, popular film and television stars, writers, industry executives, emerging artists and diverse audiences from Southern California and around the world. The festival was founded in 1999 by its executive director, Tanya Kersey, in order to enhance the careers of emerging and established black filmmakers through a public exhibition and competition program. The festival's goal is to play an integral role in discovering and launching independent films and filmmakers by bringing them to the attention of the industry, media and public. Since its inception in 1999, HBFF has screened a total of 721 independent films. In addition to screening feature, short, student, documentary, animation and music video film projects, HBFF's Infotainment Conference features dozens of informational seminars, panels and workshops covering a wide variety of topics and featuring more than 100 "industry insiders" participating in the talk-show style panels, roundtable discussions and workshops. The Storyteller Competitions Live Staged Reading showcases the work of the 3 finalist scripts in the festival's storyteller competition. |
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