2022 Black Film Festival of New Orleans

Reel Life: Many Fires This Time, One Pint at a Time, City of a Million Dreams

Film(s) To Be Screened

One Pint at a Time

Craft beer generates tens of billions of dollars annually for the US economy. Despite beer’s Egyptian and African heritage, these traditions have been mostly forgotten and are rarely found in American brewing culture. Today, Black-owned breweries make up less than 1% of the nearly 9,000 breweries in operation. Eager to shift the historical perception of who makes and drinks beer, Black brewers, brand owners and influencers across the country are reshaping the craft beer industry and the future of America’s favorite adult beverage.


Many Fires This Time

Many Fires This Time: We the 100 Million is a poetic documentary about the 1 in 3 Americans and counting, living in economic insecurity. It follows the journey of poet and activist A Scribe Called Quess? as he connects with fellow activist poets and the communities they represent from Oakland to Chicago to Kentucky to his hometown of New Orleans. Along the way, we glimpse into the worlds of everyday people fighting for equity and justice in issues ranging from housing and gentrification to police violence, to environmental crises and job security, to education, to LGBTQIA equality. In the spirit of the impending fire that James Baldwin prophetically spoke of in this country’s last season of a major uprising, “Many Fires” employs spoken word poetry, choreography, and community interviews, to form a poetic love letter to the many revolutionary struggles aflame in today’s America.


City of a Million Dreams

Why do we dance for the dead? To most people, jazz funerals are a mystery. In 2005, writer and videographer Deb Cotton leaves “hard-hearted Hollywood” for New Orleans, and becomes a chronicler of the parading club culture spawned by the legacy of funerals with music. This tradition is carried by the prolific clarinetist Michael White, renowned for playing “the widow’s wail” in sorrowful dirges. When Hurricane Katrina hits, White loses everything in the catastrophic flooding. In his struggle to rebuild, White becomes an everyman, embodying the resurrection spirit of jazz funerals. As Cotton follows the parading culture through the aching recovery, while White explores his ancestral roots in the dawn of jazz. The danced-memory of enslaved Africans charges a reimagining of antebellum Congo Square, juxtaposed with the grandeur of European marching bands. With burial pageants as a mirror on the city’s history, the film hits a violent turning point at a parade shooting, plunging Deb Cotton and Michael White into a search for the city’s soul.


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Screening Location

Online Screening

You will recieve the link to watch online after you RSVP.

Viewing Time

  • April 5, 2022, 2:45 pm CST

  • Event is over, tickets no longer available.

Video-On-Demand Availability

VOD Start: April 5, 2022, 7:00 pm

VOD End: April 12, 2022, 12:00 am

VOD Playback will be limited between those dates.


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Event is over, tickets no longer available.