culture
Black Panthers, Favelas, and Hip-Hop: A Look at Manifesto Movie Night
Toronto's premier festival of hip-hop community and culture screens the world, with mixed results.
The 5th annual Manifesto Festival of Community and Culture is on right now, and their sole film-centric event proved to be a charming—if ungainly—beast. Throwing an isolated evening of screentime into a largely music-focused 10-day extravaganza makes for a night of curious programming, where anchor film choices inevitably serve to broadcast the creative underpinnings of the festival at large. That the event’s organizers chose two strikingly different documentary features as its focal points speaks volumes to the level of ground the festival aims to cover. Manifesto, it appears, is shooting global.
Opener Waste Land, a 2010 film festival darling directed by Lucy Walker, João Jardim, and Karen Harley, follows modern art superstar Vik Muniz as he returns to his native Rio de Janeiro from the tony New York art scene to create a collaborative portrait series of a team of recyclable waste–pickers in the world’s largest garbage dump. It’s a heavy film that offers unflinching glimpses into favela poverty and, concurrently, the struggle for dignity against crushing circumstance.
Further to that, Waste Land is about the relationship between artist and subject, probing into the question of how this dynamic alters peoples’ personal narratives for better or worse. It’s a Big Ideas kind of film, the sort of experience that makes viewers ponder the ways in which art can change the world. And, not coincidentally, “Can art change the world?” was the exact question posed by one of the shorts that preceded it: French photographer JR’s TED Prize speech on his bombastic brand of social commentary, made through massive black-and-white wheatpastes. Though fascinating in its own right, an abridged version of the 24-minute TED talk would have sufficed—for brevity’s sake, and because the thing’s all on YouTube, anyway.
Feature number two was hip-hop journalist and filmmaker dream hampton‘s sloppy Black August: A Hip-Hop Documentary Concert (2010), whose patchwork assemblage of black liberation movement vignettes with conscious hip-hop concert footage (Common goes to Cuba!) results in a half-narrative seemingly designed for preaching to a choir already briefed.
The screening’s saving grace came in one of its opening shorts, a winsome tribute to Ryerson radio station CKLN’s 1–4 p.m. Saturday time slot (fittingly called 1 to 4), which offered Canada’s first hip-hop radio programming and gave local hip-hop DJs a platform from the station’s 1983 inception to its demise earlier this year. Pity that Manifesto’s movie night didn’t showcase more of these compelling local stories; maybe the schedule’s overlap with the Toronto Urban Film Festival is to blame. At any rate, what the program may have lacked in polish was made up for in heart—and really, isn’t that what community and culture are all about?