PRESS RELEASE
Media Contact & Event Bookings:
Sue Auclair, President
Sue Auclair Promotions
617.359.5771
For Immediate Release:
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
"CITY OF A MILLION DREAMS"
Parading For The Dead In New Orleans
A Film by Jason Berry
Upcoming Screenings & Discussions
with Esteemed New Orleans-Based
Filmmaker, Author & Journalist
JASON BERRY
Tuesday | June 20 | 7:30 PM
SOMERVILLE THEATRE
55 Davis Square | Somerville | MA 02144
Book Signing After The Talk with Harvard Book Store
in the theatre lobby
AND
Friday | June 23 | 7:30 PM
MARTHA'S VINEYARD FILM SOCIETY
79 Beach Road | Vineyard Haven | MA 02568
Book Signing After The Talk with Edgartown Books
in the theatre lobby
“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
Boston and Vineyard Haven, MA--Distinguished author, journalist and filmmaker Jason Berry is flying into Boston this June to present his new documentary film and give talks after two showings of "City of A Million Dreams." The first will be at The Somerville Theatre and the second will be at Martha's Vineyard Film Society on Tuesday, June 20 and Friday, June 23. Both events will occur at 7:30 pm.
Both showings will be followed by an in-depth discussion with audience participation followed by a book signing of his acclaimed history of New Orleans, City of A Million Dreams.
Harvard Square Books has partnered with the event in Somerville while Edgartown Books will partner with the Vineyard showing and talk.
The Somerville Theatre is located at 55 Davis Square in Somerville, MA 02144. Tickets are $14.00 and $10.00 for Seniors. They can be purchased here. This venue has a full liquor license and the theatre plans to offer some neat and tasty New Orleans cocktails for purchase by attendees.
The Martha's Vineyard Film Society is located at 79 Beach Road in Vineyard Haven, MA 02568. Tickets to that showing and talk are $15 General Admission, $12 for Members and $10 for children 14 and younger. Vineyard tickets can be purchased here.
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.
The film is a sequel to the book City of A Million Dreams - A History of New Orleans at Year 300, which is being taught at courses at University of California Berkeley, Georgetown, Tulane, Loyola New Orleans and several other schools.
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Tuesday | June 20 | 7:30 PM Screening & Talk with
Distinguished New Orleans
Filmmaker, Author
& Journalist
JASON BERRY
With a Harvard Book Store affiliated book signing on site at the theatre Plus special
New Orleans Cocktails!
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Book Signing At Somerville Theatre | 55 Davis Square | Somerville | MA 02144
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Friday | June 23 | 7:30 PM Showing &
Talk with New Orleans-Based Filmmaker, Author
& Journalist Jason Berry
Book Signing After the Talk
with Edgartown Books in the Theatre Lobby
Martha's Vineyard Film Society
79 Beach Road | Vineyard Haven | MA 02568
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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
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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