SPACE IS THE PLACE
“WHAT I HAD LEARNED THROUGH THE DOCUMENTARY RECORD IN THE U.S. WAS CONSTANTLY TESTED.”
{BY AL HOFF} In the near future, things are a mess on Earth, but the discovery of a wormhole might lead to a solution. So, in Interstellar, an astronaut-turned-farmer (Matthew McConaughey) leaves his family behind to lead a small NASA team to the other side of the wormhole to look for potentially habitable planets. Things, predictably, go awry in deep space — and also back on Earth (which, by the way, is not on the same timeline as the astronauts, because relativity).
Suited up: Matthew McConaughey
CP APPROVED
Christopher Nolan’s thriller is certainly ambitious: a jumble of astrophysics, family melodrama, 2001: A Space Odyssey homage and a meditation on being human. It has some strong components: good performances (McConaughey tries out a new lachrymose setting, with good sniffly results), a decent mystery (what is out there?) and some whiz-bang special effects. But it’s also overstuffed, and dialogue seems to veer between clunky scientific exposition and trite blather about the power of love (can it survive a blackhole?). Folks are gonna either love or hate the end — what if Cosmos aired on the Hallmark Channel? — depending, well, on whether you think love can survive a blackhole. But for all its flaws, Interstellar is pretty entertaining — like Nolan’s Inception, it’s some head-scratching, popcorn-munching fun — so off to space we go! In IMAX, at select theaters AHOFF@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
Catch atch
From Deep ep p,
local filmmaker ker Brett Kashmere’s new ew “mix-tape” film essay say about professional onal basketball, street treet basketball, race, media, hip hop, branding and more. Screens as part of the Three Ri Rivers ers Film Festival, and will be followed by a pick-up basketball game in the library’s gym, so wear your best kicks. 2 p.m. Sun., Nov. 16. Carnegie Library, 419 Library St., Braddock. Free
Some of the Sierra Leoneans Marcus Rediker’s film crew met making Ghosts of Amistad.
GHOST HUNTING {BY BILL O’DRISCOLL}
H
ISTORIAN Marcus Rediker usually
does his research in archives, and presents his findings in scholarly (if accessible) hardbacks like 2008’s The Slave Ship. But after publishing 2012’s The Amistad Rebellion, Rediker felt there was more to the story than could be found on paper — and that there were other ways to communicate what he’d learned. Where Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad recounted the legendary 1839 slave-ship reco rebellion and its aftermath from the rebe perspective of the rebels’ American per defenders, Rediker told it from the capdefe tured Africans’ point of view. Likewise ture with Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps the Rebels, the documentary the Univerof th sity of Pittsburgh professor has made with famed local filmmaker Tony Buba. The fam hour-long film chronicles Rediker’s search hou for traces of the rebels and their rebellion in their homeland, present-day Sierra Leone. It has its U.S. premiere Nov. 15 during the Three Rivers Film Festival. The film was shot over two weeks in
May 2013, most of it in remote dirt-road villages. The crew included: two Western experts on Sierra Leone, Conrad Tuchscherer and Philip Misevich; two cameramen, Pittsburgh-based John Rice and Freetownbased Idriss Kpange; and the group’s indispensable, Freetown-based translator and cultural go-between, Taziff Koroma.
GHOSTS OF AMISTAD 4:15 p.m. Sat., Nov. 15, at Regent Square Q&A with filmmakers follows. www.3rff.com
Rediker, the film’s producer, conducted interviews with village chiefs and other authorities. “The knowledge of slavery times was extremely uneven,” he says. But he collected some intriguing stories about the Amistad rebels both before their capture and after their return, as free men. Besides experiencing the landscape and tribal cultures firsthand, Rediker was interested to learn how well his original, paper-
based research would hold up. “What I had learned through the documentary record in the U.S. was constantly tested [in Africa],” he says. However, he was relieved that the emphasis his book placed on the significance to the rebellion of the Poro Society — a secret society for male leaders — was seconded by contemporary Sierra Leoneans. There’s also an exciting discovery about the long-untraceable location of the notorious slaving post called Lomboko. And along the way, the film portrays a seldomseen side of West Africa, one not wracked by poverty or disease (although the region was more recently hit by the Ebola virus). Buba, the film’s director, and his longtime editor, Tom Dubensky, shaped 25 hours of original footage into a package suitable for screenings in college classrooms, at festivals and, hopefully, on public television. Rediker recently accompanied the film to showings in Europe, including one at a French history festival. Upcoming dates include the Sonoma International Film Festival. D RI S C OL L @ P G H C I T Y PA P E R. C OM
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PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER 11.12/11.19.2014