New 4K Restoration Opens September 18th
New York, NY – Film Forum (9/18)
Austin, TX – Austin Film (9/18)
Montreal, QC – Cinema Moderne (9/19)
Houston, TX – River Oaks (9/19)
Washington, D.C. – Suns Cinema (9/24)
Boston, MA – The Brattle (9/25)
Toronto, ON – TIFF Lightbox (10/4)
and many more!
“Burnett fills the film with voices and memories, humor and rage; his vision of neighborhood life has an ample, passionate generosity. The drama of unresolved frustrations and stifled dreams is propelled by a sense of history looming just below the surface.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Burnett’s acute handling of actors (most of whom are nonprofessionals) never falters, and his gifts as a storyteller make this a movie that steadily grows in impact and resonance as one watches. If a better film has been made about black life, I haven’t seen it.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader
“’My Brother’s Wedding’ fits no genre. The film asks viewers to find its rhythm and move to it. What the Italian neorealists accomplished in the years after World War Two, and what a handful of daring Iranian directors have done more recently, Burnett—a one-man African-American New Wave— achieved with his first two features: he gave a culture, a people, a nation new images of themselves.” – Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema
Kino Lorber and Milestone Films are proud to release a new 4K digital restoration of My Brother’s Wedding. The second feature by American independent
master Charles Burnett, who served as the director, producer, director of photography, and screenwriter, will open in theaters in NYC at Film Forum on Friday, September 18, before expanding to select cities nationwide.
SYNOPSIS
South Central LA, the early 1980s. Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) is always on the move without ever really getting anywhere – kept busy by his parents, their dry cleaning shop, friends and neighbors. His childhood buddies are all in prison or dead and his best friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell) is just getting out of jail. Pierce’s brother Wendell (Monte Easter), on the other hand, is an up-and-coming lawyer set to marry an upper-middle-class woman (Gaye Shannon-Burnett). Pierce is entirely lacking in ambition, to the consternation of his Bible-thumping mother (Jessie Holmes), and yet he is an integral part of life in the neighborhood. When Soldier is killed in a car accident, Pierce’s conflicting obligations to family and friends manifest in the choice between his brother’s wedding and his best friend’s funeral, both falling on the same day. Charles Burnett’s second feature after Killer of Sheep is a tragicomic classic of New Black Cinema in which lived realities are shown in even the smallest of supporting roles, complex and attentive. Pierce’s wanderings reveal a portrait of a young man and a community defined in equal measure by stagnation, resignation, resistance and joie de vivre.
Digitally restored and remastered by Milestone Films in collaboration with the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. A Milestone Films
