BLACK IS…BLACK AIN’T

Ablaze with music, wit, joy, taboos, poetry, dance, and hundreds of quotes, this ultimate docu-collage from Marlon T. Riggs is a vertible concert of ideas on the urgent theme of Negro/Black/Afro-American radical identity and division. From the era when being called an “black African” was an insult in the colored community to today's PC Afro-centirc fundamentalism, Riggs' cultural tour vaults nimbly from the deep blues clubs of Missippi to the Gullah people of the Carolina coast to the jaded young verterans of South Central LA street wars. It jumps from the words of Angela Davis and Zora Hurston to those of Eddie Murphy and Louis Farrakhan. Riggs weaves his own life and family into this ethnic quilt narrating sometimes from his hospital bed-for the creator of such works as “Tongues Tied” ( 14th CIFF, 1990) and “Color Adjustment” (16th CIFF, 1992) died of AIDS last April. Completed posthumously by his colleagues, this film testifies to Riggs' brilliant intellect and valued insights.