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Bright Leaves: Southern culture
& Tobacco
"I smoked for a while, but then quit after a year, because I have asthma. So
maybe asthma saved my life. But does this mean I'm keeping myself alive just so I
can suffer with asthma? Why not just keep smoking? It's so pleasurable." --
Ross McElwee
MN Film Arts presents Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves at its all non-fiction film screen
The Bell Auditorium in Minneapolis on Friday, December 3, through Thursday, December
9. This film provides movie enthusiasts in the Twin Cities a great opportunity to
take a journey with McElwee across the social, economical and psychological tobacco
terrain of North Carolina.
In Bright Leaves, filmmaker Ross McElwee, a native North Carolinian living in Boston,
returns to his roots for, as is wife claims, "his periodic transfusion of Southern-ness."
Convinced by his second cousin, a movie buff, that Gary Cooper's tortured tobacco
baron character in the 1950 Warner Bros. melodrama "Bright Leaf" was based
on his great grand-father John -- who created the Bull Durham brand but wound up
bankrupt after wrangling with the rival Duke family clan -- McElwee seeks out friends,
relatives, former teachers and other colorful southern characters on his quest for
the truth.
Bright Leaves is both a mystery and a memoir in progress. Spoken in his ruminative
drawl, McElwee lays out his life as an ongoing narrative about mortality, loss and
prevention, addiction and denial, his own family, its legacy and the legacy of tobacco
for the state of North Carolina. The North Carolinians McElwee captures -- teenage
beauticians who giggle and smoke outside their shop, an amateur gospel singer who
rejoices for the next world through her music, to the elderly hospital cancer patients
trying to hang on to their dignity -- make up the intensely vivid American portrait
gallery of the film's cast of characters.
McElwee has made seven feature length documentaries shot in his homeland of the American
South. His films have been included in the festivals of Berlin, London, Vienna, Rotterdam,
Florence, Sydney, and Wellington. He has taught filmmaking at Harvard University
since 1986, where he is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental
Studies.
The film screens nightly at 7:00 and 9:15 p.m., with 5 p.m. matinees Saturday and
Sunday and no late screenings December 7 or 9). Bell Auditorium is at 17th and University
Ave. SE, Minneapolis, in the Bell Museum of Natural History. More information about
the screening can be found at www.mnfilmarts.org or by calling (612) 331-3134. |
| Dec 2004 |
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