Event

MEMPHIS at PhilaMOCA

Sunday, November 23, 2014
Two screenings: 4:30 + 7:30 PM
Doors open 30 minutes prior to start time.
$10, no refunds or exchanges

Co-presented by Reelblack
http://reelblack.com

A strange singer with God-given talent drifts through his adopted city of Memphis with its canopy of ancient oak trees, streets of shattered windows, and aura of burning spirituality. Surrounded by beautiful women, legendary musicians, a stone-cold hustler, a righteous preacher, and a wolf pack of kids, the sweet, yet unstable, performer avoids the recording studio, driven by his own form of self-discovery. His journey quickly drags him from love and happiness right to the edge of another dimension.

Writer/director Tim Sutton crafts an impressionistic folktale framed around the enigmatic musician/poet Willis Earl Beal and the city of Memphis. Adding a new legend to the city's rich history, Memphis is an elusive document of myth-making and the sources that feed those myths. Similar to his first feature, Pavilion, Sutton blurs the lines between fiction and reality, taking the audience to a wholly contemporary dreamlike world, bolstered by Chris Dapkins's sublime camera and a driving blues soundtrack by Beal.

"In Tim Sutton's second feature, "Memphis," the musician Willis Earl Beal plays a blues singer of the same name, who is facing a devastating artistic crisisa composing and performing block. His desperate efforts at self-healing take him on a spiritual journey through the city of the title as he encounters friends, confidants, and religious counsellors dispensing hard-earned wisdom. Memphis itself plays a leading role in the film, by way of richly textured, sunlight-imbued images of streets and houses, churches and roads. With his loamy mosaic of drifting moods and troubled memories, Sutton offers a pictorial translation of the blues, a vision of an American classicism sheltered by the urban landscape's mystical embrace." Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

PhilaMOCA
531 N. 12th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19123
http://www.philamoca.org