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To Sleep with Anger

Director in Person
Screening on Film
Directed by Charles Burnett.
With Danny Glover, Paul Butler, Mary Alice.
US, 1990, 35mm, color, 105 min.

An ambitious mix of folklore and family feud, To Sleep with Anger presents the powerful, poetic, and humorous drama of a contemporary African-American family and the changes that overcome its members when an old friend shows up unannounced. The catalyst for the domestic turmoil is the arrival of Harry Mention (Glover), a brooding, malevolent charmer with a boxful of belongings and a century’s worth of folklore. Like a character from the stories he tells, Harry magnifies familial conflicts, stirs suspicions, and brings the family to a perilous crossroads. Poised between mysticism and melodrama, the film muses on the complex relationships between present and past, good and evil, and on the enduring centrality of family bonds.

PRECEDED BY

  • Olivia's Story

    Directed by Charles Burnett.
    US, 1999, 16mm, color, 14 min.

A Little League baseball game becomes the unlikely context for this lyrical drama about memory and loss, told from the perspective of a Korean-American woman and her grandmother.

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