Wednesday,
April 4 at 7pm
Scribe
Video Center Producers’ Forum
Some
Kind of Funny Porto Rican
dir.
Claire Andrade-Watkins, USA, 2006, video, 83 mins, color
Director
Claire Andrade-Watkins in person
 Claire
Andrade-Watkins worked for over ten years to tell the history
of her beloved Cape Verdean Fox Point section of Providence,
Rhode Island. Full of childhood memories, textures and sounds
of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, Some Kind of Funny
Porto Rican, chronicles her community's music, ties to
the old country, and the maritime/seafaring traditions, especially
the longshoremen, who "worked the boats" in the Port
of Providence. Three generations of Cape Verdeans were born
and raised in this tight knit neighborhood that stretched along
the waterfront. But the story is also of tragedy and scandal
as this vibrant community of immigrants was forcibly displaced
by urban renewal in the 1970s.
Who
Cape Verdeans are remains a largely untold story, hence the
film’s title. Cape Verde, lying 240 nautical miles off the coast
of West Africa, is a tiny, archipelago of ten islands. Cape
Verdeans were the only Africans to travel freely to America
as they left their drought stricken islands to work in the whaling
trade and arrived on the shores of New England. The anguish
of the separation from their home is immortalized in Cape Verdean
music, especially the "morna", popularized internationally
by such artists Cesaria Evora. Again uprooted by urban renewal
in the l970s, the disbanded Cape Verdeans scattered to other
parts of Rhode Island, but Fox Point remains "home".
preceded
by
Petty's
Island: An Untold History
Produced
by Camden City African American Commission & Scribe Video
Center
Petty’s
Island, located just North of the Ben Franklin Bridge in the
middle of the Delaware River, was an oil pumping station that
has been reclaimed by nature into a beautiful habitat with nesting
eagles. This documentary, produced as part of Scribe’s Precious
Places Community History Project shows how Petty’s Island, a
former depot for enslaved Africans, is being threatened by development
plans to turn the island into a gated community.
Claire
Andrade-Watkins,
a historian and filmmaker, has published extensively on French
and Portuguese language African cinema in leading academic journals
and film publications including Framework, International
Journal of African History, Journal of Visual Anthropology,
and The Independent. She is coeditor of Blackframes:
Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema. From
1995 to 1996 she was a Fulbright Scholar in Cape Verde, where
she conducted research on indigenous cinema. She was an Associate
Producer on Odyssey, a PBS anthropology and archaeology
documentary series, and Assistant to the Producer on Haile Germia’s
Sankofa. She is an Associate Professor of Visual and
Media Arts, at Emerson College in Boston. She founded Spia Media
to document, preserve and disseminate cultural productions from
Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, with a particular
emphasis on Cape Verdean-American and Cape Verdean history,
culture and traditions.
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