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PRESS RELEASE
Media Contact & Event Bookings:
Sue Auclair, President
Sue Auclair Promotions
[email protected]
617.359.5771
For Immediate Release:
October 26, 2023
"CITY OF A MILLION DREAMS"
Parading For The Dead In New Orleans
A Film by New Orleans-Based
Filmmaker, Author & Journalist
JASON BERRY
Screening Kicks Off
The 12th Annual
I've Known Rivers Film Festival
Sunday | December 3
Topanga Canyon
“New Orleans people have a compulsive drive to do everything the opposite of everywhere else. Maybe dancing when someone dies
is the most brilliant thing you can do.” - Deborah "Big Red" Cotton
Topanga Canyon, Topanga, CA--"City of A Million Dreams," the groundbreaking documentary about jazz funerals in New Orleans is now set for a screening at the I've Known Rivers Festival on Sunday, December 3.
FA-MLI, Inc., a dynamic non-profit organization dedicated to arts, mentoring, leadership, and innovation founded by Torrence Brannon-Reese, has just announced that this year's I've Known Rivers Film Festival which takes place from Sunday, December 3, through Saturday, December 9, 2023, promising six days of rich cultural experiences.
The festival will kick off with a spectacular Opening Night Gala at the exquisite Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum which is located at 1419 North Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Topanga, CA 90290. Tickets are available now HERE.
Scheduled for Sunday, December 3rd, 2023, from 5 pm to 8 pm, this gala event will pay homage to the vibrant culture of New Orleans, Louisiana. The highlight of the evening will be the screening of the acclaimed documentary, "City of a Million Dreams," directed by New Orleans-based filmmaker and writer, Jason Berry. The film provides a critical and immersive exploration of the heart and soul of New Orleans.
The gala will also feature an exclusive round table discussion with filmmaker, author and journalist Jason Berry, choreographer Monique Moss, film editor and co-producer Tim Watson, co-producer, UPM, production designer and writer Simonette Berry, director of photography Harris Done and the legendary educator and jazz musician, Dr. Michael White.
To further enhance the New Orleans experience, Torrence Brannon-Reese and his band, Everything with Soul, will perform live, capturing the vibrant sounds of the city.
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TORRENCE BRANNON-REESE + Everything With Soul | |
Guests can savor the flavors of New Orleans with a delectable selection of indigenous foods, including Gumbo, Jambalaya and Seafood Etouffée. | |
A fashion segment and a special photo gathering celebrating New Orleans culture will round out this unforgettable evening. Here are some historic shots from our past events: | |
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Tickets for the Opening Night Gala are available for $65 (general admission) and $150 for VIP access. All proceeds from the event support the valuable programs, services and activities provided by FA-MLI, Inc., including its arts, culture, education and social justice initiatives.
Tickets are available HERE or by calling 323-245-2133 or by email at [email protected].
The film "City of A Million Dream - Parading for The Dead In New Orleans" explores the origins and creation of the New Orleans jazz funeral -- a passionate and fiery display at once of grief and joy, sadness and elation, weeping and dancing, feathers and sequins with hope for the living and so much more.
The film follows two compelling navigational figures. Deb "Big Red Cotton," a blogger and videographer, leaves "hard hearted Hollywood" and plunges into the world of New Orleans funerals and street parades. Dr. Michael White, a professor, clarinetist and esteemed jazz composer searching for the story of an ancestor at the birth of jazz, loses everything in Hurricane Katrina. As Deb and Michael meet, their intertwined quest takes this film deep into the soul of New Orleans and its history.
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Jason Berry is the rare investigative reporter whose scholarship, compassion, and ability to write with the poetic power of Robert Penn Warren are in perfect balance. — Phyllis Theroux, USA Today
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photo by Owen Murphy, Jr.
City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (2018) was Jason Berry’s tenth book, and the basis for the companion documentary film he produced, "City of a Million Dreams - Parading for the Dead In New Orleans."
“His optimism, a faith of sorts, is grounded in the very story he tells,” Larry Blumenfeld wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “of a city still defined by ‘pageantries and memory rituals of its varied people’ and’ ‘where people of different colors and cultures have daily interactions as they have done for generations.’ His book, an indispensable history, explains both what we might take care not to lose and why it’s so easy to believe it will always be so.”
Berry is a distinguished author and investigative journalist based in New Orleans. He has done extensive reporting on the crisis in the Catholic Church in many articles, an award-winning documentary, "Vows of Silence," and three books. "Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church" received the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson foundations.
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The words “funeral” and “joyous” rarely come coupled in the same sentence. Yes, funerals are often used to celebrate a life, but the celebration is usually muted, even solemn. But not in New Orleans. In the Crescent City, they turn mourning into music, with brass bands playing dirges that serenade the hearses to the graveyard. And on the way back, those dirges transform into joyful, upbeat melodies that turn funeral processions into parades, the ultimate triumph of life over death.
In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry’s moving documentary tribute to New Orleans’ tradition of jazz funerals, local columnist and blogger Deborah “Big Red” Cotton marks the uniqueness of these events when she says, “New Orleans people have a compulsive drive to do everything the opposite of everywhere else. Maybe dancing when someone dies is the most brilliant thing you can do.”
There is nothing trivial about these rituals. “The jazz funeral helps us to transition from death to a new existence, a new spiritual existence,” says Dr. Michael White, the renowned musical historian, composer, and himself an accomplished clarinetist who has by his own estimation played in hundreds of funerals.
White and Cotton, who obsessively filmed and wrote about her adopted city’s traditions of funerals, street parades, and social aid and pleasure clubs, are the documentary’s principal narrators, and their comments on the traditions of Black New Orleans, some dating back two centuries or more, are both authoritative and eloquent. And sometimes quite haunting, as when Cotton says, “The beauty and the problem with living in New Orleans is that at any given moment life and death can change places with each other.”
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A FEW FILM REVIEWS
“Yes, funerals — as in the famous joint expressions of mourning and celebration that feature “second line” dance marches to mark the joy of a soul’s ascent into heaven. As director Berry shows, those ceremonies have extraordinarily complex roots and meanings. What his documentary does, lovingly and in mesmerizingly watchable fashion, is explore the African American culture from which jazz funerals evolved — and how the funerals epitomize the soul and resilience of the Crescent City perpetually endangered by storms, floods, fires, coastal erosion, and diseases such as Yellow Fever.”
– Quin Hillyer, The Washington Examiner
“It’s a movie of jazz funerals, second lines, roof dancing and swamp dwelling; of shootings and costumes and death, but ultimately of life and the living. In a nutshell, Dreams occupies a dreamlike space that encapsulates a world henceforth not known well to outsiders.”
– Alex DeVore, Santa Fe Reporter
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City of a Million Dreams: Parading for the Dead in New Orleans screened on Friday at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center.
FILM
Jazz Funerals Tell the Story of New Orleans
Monday, June 26, 2023 - 3:40pm
Journalist, author and filmmaker Jason Berry took decades to create his new documentary about New Orleans jazz funerals, a tradition unique to the city where he was born.
“I started filming funerals with music in the 1990s,” Mr. Berry told the audience at last Friday’s screening of City of a Million Dreams: Parading for the Dead in New Orleans, at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven.
A longtime New Orleans journalist, Mr. Berry wrote the 1992 book Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, the first book on what has proved to be an international scandal. He followed it up in 2004 with the book and film Vows of Silence.
Mr. Berry is also a longtime scholar of jazz and a co-author, in 1986, of the widely-read history Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II. While that book focused on postwar years, studying jazz funerals took him all the way back to the beginning of New Orleans three centuries ago.
“This is a profoundly spiritual tradition, [and] a mirror of the history of the city,” said Mr. Berry, who made the film while writing his latest book, City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300.
Both film and book explore the origins of the city’s jazz funerals, street parades and the “second line” of dancers who flock to these events. To tell his story, Mr. Berry combined contemporary video with archival footage, still photographs and illustrations from New Orleans as it emerged under the rule of Spain, France and the United States.
All three nations supported chattel slavery, with the Spanish first to pack their ships with abducted West Africans to do the new colony’s hard labor. Deprived of their freedom, the enslaved people held on to their cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs. In New Orleans’s Congo Square, they were allowed to gather on Sundays for African-style ring dances accompanied by drums — a custom powerfully reenacted for the film by a Black choreographer and dancers with West African percussionists.
The Europeans who settled in New Orleans brought traditions of their own, including funerals with music and bands that marched in a line.
Mr. Berry’s film shows how the cultural streams began to flow together over the centuries, with the solemn funeral band and vigorous ring dance combining their energies with gospel hymns and jazz.
Stepping slowly to the church while playing songs about heaven, New Orleans funeral bands turn up the energy with hot jazz numbers on their way back, joined by second line dancers who quickly fill the streets around the first line of musicians.
This revelry links to both Christianity, which holds that heaven is a better place, and the beliefs of early enslaved people that their deaths would send them back to Africa, according to Mr. Berry’s film.
By the mid-20th century, marching bands were also taking part in street parades organized by the city’s famous social aid and pleasure clubs such as the venerable Zulu organization, founded in 1916.
But by the 1990s, New Orleans was suffering from the twin epidemics of crack cocaine and gangster culture, which spurred the deaths of many young men. The film’s footage of angry mourners, spraying beer on a coffin and chanting slogans during the funeral procession, bears out the concerns that veteran musicians expressed to Mr. Berry at the time.
“They felt a certain spiritualism was . . . being removed,” he said at the film center.
Jazz legend Danny Barker, a mentor to many younger players including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, was so disturbed by the gangster influence that before he died in 1994, he told his wife not to organize a jazz funeral at all. But younger musicians vowed to the widow that they’d make sure it was done right, and Mr. Barker’s funeral procession is one of many inspiring moments in the film.
Northerners’ eyes may widen at some other sequences, including a funeral jam session with the widower on vocals, a couple dancing by the open coffin and a saxophonist playing a solo directly into it. But that’s New Orleans, where death and life are always side by side and even the coffins remain above ground in the low-lying city’s famous crypts.
“I think how a society buries people speaks volumes about how it values the living,” Mr. Berry said.
City of a Million Dreams: Parading for the Dead in New Orleans screened as part of the film center’s annual Filmusic festival, which ended Sunday.
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City of a Million Dreams
Parading for the Dead in New Orleans
Documentaire de Jason Berry (réalisation et production, Spirit Tide), 90 min., USA, en anglais avec une version sous-titrée en français, 2021, sorti aux Etats-Unis, Royaume Uni
City of a Million Dreams est tiré d’un livre (2018) éponyme de Jason Berry dont le sous-titre est: «A History of New Orleans at Year 300», alors que le sous-titre du film est: «Parading for the Dead in New Orleans». Jason est un journaliste d’investigation, écrivain, réalisateur, et l’idée d’avoir pris pour le documentaire, l’axe et l’histoire des parades funéraires de la ville, devenues légendaires, sont un prisme intéressant pour retracer la construction spirituelle et artistique corrélée à l’énergie de New Orleans, qu’elle soit la conséquence de son esprit rebelle, résistant, faisant face aussi bien à la nature déchaînée –ouragans ou épidémies–, qu’aux hommes déshumanisés –de l’esclavage à la ségrégation, la corruption ou la misère–, mais venant aussi de l’ancrage dans ses ancêtres, les spirits, qui transmettent aux vivants la force d’espérer, de lutter, de se dépasser pour essayer sans relâche de créer un monde plus juste.
A New Orleans, les déshérités luttent contre l’adversité, en ralliant les morts, les vivants et ceux à naître, agrégeant toutes les fois et rites protecteurs (syncrétisme religieux) contre les forces maléfiques en général bien réelles et concrètes dans un vécu difficile, ralliant les traditions indiennes aux différentes églises en passant par le vaudou ou les pratiques sociales de toutes les communautés, notamment afro-américaine et sicilienne par la pratique du jazz (dont le gospel et le blues), de la danse voire de la transe, avec cette particularité de croire dans le surnaturel profane malgré l’interdiction des clergés institués, le désespoir faisant feu de tout bois, avec un bon sens sans exclusive!
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A bold, witty, character-driven history of New Orleans, just in time for its tricentennial."—Larry Blumenfeld, Wall Street Journal
Berry not only traces . . . overlaps of sound and spectacle; he uses overlapping narratives. . . . We see New Orleans, after another of its near-death experiences, still stubbornly not knowing how to die when it ought to."—Garry Wills, New York Review of Books
Every major city should have such a guide to its past."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
A hypnotic biography of a unique American city. . . . City of a Million Dreams is history writing at its best, in which high-caliber prose manages to be as interesting as its subject."—Foreword Reviews
Captures the reader's attention with a cavalcade of astoundingly detailed accounts of the exploits and adventures of a cornucopia of outstanding people who have left an enduring mark on New Orleans and the conflicts that have forged its distinctive urban culture."—Ed Conroy, Houston Chronicle
A powerful narrative about the making of a place, against all odds."—January Magazine
City of a Million Dreams is a well-informed, masterfully-written, encapsulation of everything, good and bad, that makes New Orleans one of the most unique and adored cities in the world; it is a welcomed addition to the literature on the city. --Louisiana History
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