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Filmmakers come home to the Roxbury Film Festival
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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Topper Carew got his start in film on Huntington Avenue. Once a week, he’d skip school to see movies at the old Symphony moviehouse on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue. "If you went before 11:30," he says over the phone from Los Angeles, "you got in for 35 cents." Carew grew up in Boston and Roxbury, attending Howard University, then Yale, then MIT for a year-long fellowship to study film. After a stint as a producer at WGBH, he headed off to Hollywood, where he’s produced, written, and directed movies and television shows, including the sit-com Martin and the 1991 film Talking Dirty After Dark. He’s returning to Roxbury this week to screen two of his recent feature-length documentaries at the 6th Annual Roxbury Film Festival, which opens Wednesday and runs through Sunday with screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Mass College of Art, and Northeastern University. RFF-6 champions work by filmmakers of color, with a particular bent toward New Englanders, and it’s the largest festival of its kind in the Northeast. It begins on Wednesday with a retrospective screening of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Ivan Dixon’s controversial film about a black CIA operative who deserts the government and prepares a street gang for a race war. Sudz Sutherland’s award-winning Love, Sex & Eating the Bones, in which a man’s porn addiction gets in the way of an actual romance, will screen at the official opening-night ceremony on Thursday. African Dance: Sand, Drum & Shostakovich, from Boston filmmakers Ken Glazebrook and Allan Kovgan, screens on Friday. Street Life, which was produced and directed by Roxbury native Antonio G. Cardoso, will be shown on Saturday. And Sunday brings Joseph Tovares’s Bus to the Burbs, which examines Boston’s Metco program by following one Latino student in his senior year at Weston High School. The festival also features programs of shorts and animation, panel discussions, and workshops including "Tips for Sustaining an Acting Career" with Ernie ("Who Ya Gonna Call") Hudson of Ghostbusters fame. Carew’s documentaries, We Don’t Die, We Multiply: The Robin Harris Story and The Fine Art of Frying Chicken, screen at the MFA on Sunday. When Carew was growing up in Roxbury (he was born in 1943), he says, "It was a real neighborhood, really seriously defined, a rich, cultural neighborhood" where everyone knew everyone and there was little violence. "It hasn’t lost its sense of neighborhood, but it has fallen prey to economic woe, social woe. It’s a neighborhood that constantly fights to keep itself alive. And I see the film festival helping to redefine the sense of pride Roxbury was so famous for." Carew has been a speaker at the Roxbury Film Festival before, but this is the first time he’s showing his films. "It’s a great and joyous moment. The home-town boy showing his films at the MFA palace. I’m glad that the film festival is hammering to keep Roxbury alive. The banner of Roxbury needs to rise." The Roxbury Film Festival runs August 18 through 22, with screenings in the Museum of Fine Arts’ Remis Auditorium (465 Huntington Avenue), Massachusetts College of Art’s Tower Auditorium (621 Huntington Avenue), and Northeastern University’s Blackman Auditorium (346 Huntington Avenue) and Behrakis Center (30 Leon Street). Tickets are $5 for panel discussions, $10 for film screenings, $50 for a festival pass (includes screenings and panels), and $75 for a VIP pass (including screenings, panels, and an opening reception). For a complete schedule, call (617) 541-3900 extension 233, or visit www.roxburyfilmfestival.org
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