COMPENSATION

Two actors, two couples, two eras, two Americas, two loves, two plagues. One feature motion picture, singular and affecting, like nothing you've seen before. And one city ? Chicago ? around the turn of the century, 1900. That's where and when a deaf-mute young woman of color named Malindy Brown befriends Arthur Jones, an illiterate relocated from Mississippi. And it's at the turn of the century, 2000, that African-American Malaika Brown gets into a groove with a brother named Nico Jones (each pair is portrayed by John Earl Jelks and deaf actress Michelle A. Banks). Cutting between the parallel stories of these twinned lovers, trapped by the circumstances and scourges of their time periods, Zeinabu irene Davis explores what changes over time and what remains constant, both in terms of the social climate and the mortality to which we are all, in a way, ever-after shackled. Shot in timeless black-and-white, COMPENSATION was inspired by verse written by Dayton poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as he lay dying in 1905, but is as current as the latest AIDS statistics.