May 2022 - A Raisin in the Sun
Hello everyone! It's May and we are looking forward to our next Cinema Club screening on Monday night. This month we are celebrating Sidney Poitier and screening A Raisin in the Sun directed by Daniel Petri, based on the play written by Lorraine Hansberry.

A Raisin in the Sun is the story of an African-American family living together in a cramped Chicago apartment in the 1950s. The family must decide what to do with a substantial insurance payment they will soon receive. There will be lots to discuss about this classic movie and we hope you will join us. There's still a few seats left so please register if you haven't already!

Reminder: Cinema Club meets in the Aspen Drive Library Meeting Room in Vernon Hills. Masks optional.

Here's a few articles to skim beforehand.
Criterion's essay on A Raisin in the Sun by Associate Professor of English Sarita Cannon has great info about both the film and the compromises playwright and screenwriter Lorraine Hansberry had to make to bring the film to the screen.

"[Hansberry] demonstrates a keen awareness of the multiple ways in which people of African descent in the United States have fought for their right to live with dignity, calling into question the idea that there is any difference at all between radical and respectable resistance."
This New Yorker article by Michael Shulman discusses Sidney Poitier's legacy and the burden associated with his 1964 Best Actor Oscar win for Lilies of the Field. Schulman explores Poitier's mixed feelings about the award, and the burdens associated with being the first (and for so many years, the only) Black actor to have won an Oscar. This is interesting to read as it relates to the parallel issue in A Raisin in the Sun - the first black family in a white neighborhood.

"His Oscar legacy is about more than “progress.” It’s also about solitude and the limits of symbolic victories."
Yet another Criterion essay about A Raisin in the Sun. This time focusing on actress Diana Sands who plays Poitier's independent sister in the film.

"The eye of the camera could not contain Diana Sands. In the handful of films she made during her brief time on earth, she disrupts the calculated equilibrium of a scene, blazing through takes and keeping acting partners on their toes with the spontaneous force of her coruscating presence."
Next Movie: Keaton/Chaplin Double Feature
June 20, 2022
Aspen Drive Library Meeting Room

One Week
1920 | Rated G | 25min
A newly wedded couple attempts to build a house with a prefabricated kit, unaware that a rival sabotaged the kit's component numbering. Starring Buster Keaton.

Modern Times
1936 | Rated G | 1h 27min
The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman. Starring Charlie Chaplin.

REMINDER: You must register for each Cinema Club screening. Receiving this newsletter is not an indication you are registered for next month's showing.