FYC: Sean Bobbitt for Best Cinematography

by Cláudio Alves

Director Shaka King (left) and Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (right)

Sean Bobbitt started as a news camera shooter, a photojournalist more than a cineaste. His first feature was Michael Winterbottom's 1999 Cannes Competition entry Wonderland, an auspicious beginning to what would become a splendorous filmography. The collaboration with British director Steve McQueen came to define the cinematographer's career, their work running the gamut from commercials to museum installations and award-winning films like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. Despite all this, Sean Bobbitt has never been nominated for an Oscar. Thanks to Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, that sad state of affairs may be about to change…

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Almost There: Michael Fassbender in "Shame"

by Cláudio Alves

With the films of Steve McQueen's anthology, Small Axe, earning critical raves as they traverse through the festival circuit, it's a good time to remember some of his previous projects. While 12 Years a Slave was a great success that conquered acclaim and many awards, the rest of the director's filmography has been more polarizing and arguably underrated. It feels wrong, for instance, that his recurring muse, Michael Fassbender, got the first of two Oscar nominations for his least impressive contribution to McQueen's oeuvre. He was much more deserving two years before that best Picture winner, in 2011's Shame...

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NYFF: Steve McQueen's "Red White and Blue"

by Jason Adams

And so we come to the third piece that the New York Film Festival is screening out of Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series of five total films -- if you missed my thoughts on Lovers Rock you can read them here and if you missed my thoughts on Mangrove you can read those right here. NYFF flip-flopped the screening order on the previous chapters and Red White and Blue, today's focus, jumps us to all the way to the final chapter of the series, and you can sense that about it. It has the feel of a breath, a pause -- a looking back upon itself and taking tenative, pained stock.

As with Mangrove we're focusing again on a true story. This time it's the 1980s and John Boyega plays Leroy Logan, a young man who was on track to become a forensic scientist until his father was assaulted by a couple of racist cops...

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NYFF: Steve McQueen's "Mangrove"

by Jason Adams

Well we knew the party couldn't last forever -- it's 2020 after all, and there's serious work to be done. Last week the New York Film Festival officially opened with Lovers Rock, the second part of Steve McQueen's five-part "Small Axe" series of films all set within the same West Indian community in London where McQueen grew up (and which are set to air on the BBC and Amazon starting at the end of November) -- Lovers Rock, which I reviewed at this link, was set over the course of a single night, a single party, and reveled in tactility and sound, in the moment; it allowed its characters to lose themselves in song and sex and joy. Tonight the NYFF rewinds back us to premiere Small Axe's first part, titled Mangrove and based on the famous legal battle of 1970 involving the so-dubbed "Mangrove Nine," a group of local activists who were wrongly accused of inciting a riot by a corrupt and racist police department.

So no, no big party here -- this one's a courtroom drama. And a rip-roaring one at that... Although it takes its time becoming exactly that...

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NYFF Opening Night: Lovers Rock

by Jason Adams

Black joy is revolutionary. Even as a white dude -- even then! -- that's not hard for me to get. People of color have been saddled with being the standard bearers for suffering for so long -- look no further than the Slavery horror film Antebellum out in cinemas this weekend; or hey how about the news every single day and night? -- that joy becomes its own act of defiance: just song, dance, and smiles. A shuffling off of the strangleholds, the exemplary expectations, the time to scream proud and wild and free, not a thought or burden in the world. Liberation exists in the very molecules of that space...

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