Reel Harlem Film Festival: "Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun"

Performance Exhibition: Harlem GOJU Association (7:30 p.m.)

Short: Life and Times of Little Jimmy (8:30 p.m.)
(B. Alison McDonald, USA, 15 min.)
This film is a portrait of a young black writer isolated in the God-fearing ghetto of Depression era Harlem. Rejected by his mother and his best friend, Jimmy seeks refuge in his relationship with Glenda, a prostitute. Herself a lost soul, she cannot comfort or console him, but offers him something he's never had before — acceptance.

Film: Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun
(Sam Pollard, USA 83 min.)
Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God). This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making, portrays Zora in all her complexity: gifted, flamboyant, and controversial but always fiercely original.

Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun intersperses insights from leading scholars and rare footage of the rural South (some of it shot by Zora herself) with re-enactments of a revealing 1943 radio interview. Hurston biographer, Cheryl Wall, traces Zora's unique artistic vision back to her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town in the U.S. There Zora was surrounded by proud, self-sufficient, self-governing black people, deeply immersed in African American folk traditions. Her father, a Baptist preacher, carpenter and three times mayor, reminded Zora every Sunday morning that ordinary black people could be powerful poets. Her mother encouraged her to "jump at de' sun," never to let being black and a woman stand in the way of her dreams.

Co-presented by Reel Sisters of the Diaspora

Rain Venue: Inside the Jackie Robinson Recreation Center at 146th Street & Bradhurst Avenue