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Thanks to a collaboration with the Reading Bloom, the Lido is hosting the Italian premieres of the restored versions (by Ross Lipman of Milestone) of two films by Billy Woodberry, one of the leading exponents of African-American independent film and a member of the movement L.A. Rebellion. The coming-of-age tale told in the short film The pocketbook will be screened at Isola Edipo on September 1 at 10:30 pm, while the feature film Bless Their Little Hearts, written by Charles Burnett and offering an intense portrayal of African-American life in the 1980s, will be screened at the Villa degli Autori on September 2 at 9:30 pm.
BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTSUnited States, 1984, 84'With a screenplay by Charles Burnett, Bless Their Little Hearts is an intense portrayal of African-American life in the 1980s. Shot in the working-class neighborhood Watts in Los Angeles, it shows the devastating effects of unemployment on a couple with young children. Charlie Banks struggles to find work, day in and day out. His wife Andais is exhausted from taking care of the children alone all day while Charlie takes any odd job he can find, cutting the grass or painting houses. At night he falls asleep in the bathtub.
Billy Woodberry (Dallas, 1950) is one of the leading exponents of the L.A. Rebellion, a film movement that thrived from the late 1960s to the late 80s at UCLA in Los Angeles, featuring African-American independent filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Julie Dash and Larry Clark. Woodberry graduated from UCLA in 1982 and would later teach film there; since 1989 he has also taught at the School of Film/Video and the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts. His first feature film, Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), is considered one of the finest expressions of the L.A. Rebellion movement and reflects the influence of Neorealism and the Third Cinema filmmakers. In 2017 Woodberry received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent work, the video installation A Story from Africa, premiered this year at the Berlinale, in Forum Expanded.
