Daily Archives: May 29, 2015

Few musicians have had such an everlasting impression on the music of the 20th century internationally as the legendary Reggae and Dub producer and vocalist Lee “Scratch” Perry. “Vision of Paradise” is a new documentary that Scratch is the subject of as well as an executive producer along with Volker Schaner, who we contacted in Germany to get this exclusive interview.

The film is in French with English subtitles and is set primarily in France, beginning in 1963. Two children from Reunion Island, a French colony that lies east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, were among 1,600 children from the island brought to France for forced adoptions by farmers to repopulate the countryside. Their mother gave them to a white couple who promised her they would make them doctors but in the end enslaved them.

In the documentary “Farming a Legacy,” I learned that since the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the biggest fights that Blacks have had in this country was and is to own and retain farmland. In the 1920s, there were 1,000,000 Black owned farms in the United States. By 2013, that number had dropped to 18,000. “Farming a Legacy” is a majestic cinematic look at the day to day life and family history of a third generation farmer named Dale Jones.

The 38-minute short film “Hagereseb” is a rare cinematic treat, and it will be making its Bay Area debut during the San Francisco Black Film Festival on Saturday, June 13. It is not a foreign film but has the feeling of one because it is about two 10-year-old second generation Eritrean friends, who live in the Yesler Terrace housing project in Seattle, Washington, which was built in the ‘40s as the first integrated housing project in the U.S.

The deadline to comment on new – and unacceptable – rules for prison visiting is Friday, June 5! Issued by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCr) supposedly to keep drugs and cell phones from being smuggled into the prisons – contraband most often brought in by guards for sale to prisoners – the new rules call for strip searching any visitor singled out by sniffing dogs. But only visitors have to submit to a strip search. All others entering are only subject to an airport type pat-down search. Please send in your comments by June 5 and in addition, everyone is urged to sign the petition described herein.