USA,
1991, 91 min
Shown in 1991
CREDITS
- dir
-
Matty Rich
- prod
-
Matty Rich
- scr
-
Matty Rich
- cam
-
Jack Rosnell
- editor
-
Jack Haigis
- cast
-
George T. Odom, Anne D. Sanders, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Barbara Sanon
- source
-
Samuel Goldwyn Co.
-
COMMENTS
Matty Rich in person.
OTHER
Straight Out of Brooklyn is a realistic drama about the Third World that exists within the first world of America, based on the lives of people whom the filmmaker actually knows. Filmed on location in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects, the film is brutally frank in its depiction of a struggling, Black working-class family. It raises hard questions about social, economic and radical clichés, but ultimately the audience is left to draw its own conclusions. Ray Brown is a Black man who blames white people because he cannot provide his family with the things he has spent years in a low-paying job trying to get. Ray takes his anger and frustration out on his wife Frankie, who tries to hold the family together despite her savage abuse. The Browns' son, Dennis, searches for a quick way to rescue his family and move it into the mainstream of the American Dream. He and his friends plot a risky robbery in the belief that this is their way "straight out of Brooklyn." Their plan is destined to have a devastating effect on the Brown family. Marked by a grittily realistic style and an ensemble of exceptionally fine performances, Straight Out of Brooklyn is an impressive debut for 19-year-old Matty Rich, who joins the current renaissance among Black filmmakers in America.
—Geoff Gilmore, Sundance Film Festival
FACTOID #208
Before the showing of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest at the 40th SFIFF, Bay Area editor Walter Murch (who selected the film to screen in the Indelible Images series), passed out fortune cookies to the crowd with Bresson’s musings on making films.
