OK, first thing … You need to carve 30 minutes out of your day and watch the mini-documentary Glen’s Village, a film about a kid who grew up around 52nd and Haverford, was dealing crack by the 9th grade and is now, thanks to the strength of his mother and himself, a student at Penn. (It’s embedded below).
The film takes you through Glen’s childhood growing up with a dad who was, as one person in the film puts it, basically a “drug kingpin.” He was later deported to Jamaica, leaving Glen’s mother to raise him alone. It wasn’t going well as he entered his teens and by ninth grade Glen was regularly skipping school and selling drugs.
But at University City High School he turns it around. As one of the school’s star students, Glen testified before the School Reform Commission as it considered closing the school. UC High’s closure is an important part of the film, as is his work at Sayre High School, where he teaches part time to fulfill his scholarship obligations. Continue Reading
“What they might now see is not always what it was.”
This statement, in its simplicity, carries weight. It’s as somber as it is matter-of-fact—a wistful acknowledgment that the blight that now dots the Mill Creek neighborhood is not the contour that defines it or the future it’s nurturing.
This statement is also at the heart of The Mill Creek Documentary: Past, Present, and Future, a new film by the Mill Creek Community Partnership (MCCP) and Eli Lu Productions exploring and honoring the three prongs of Mill Creek’s history (view trailer below). It’s a provoking documentary that encapsulates shifting images and heavy interviews with hopeful poignancy—refusing to accept the systematic and social issues that devastated the streets north of Market as permanent.
This Friday, Dec. 20, MCCP and Eli Lu Productions will screen The Mill Creek Documentary for Mill Creek residents—and those beyond the West Philly community—at St. Ignatius Nursing Home, 4401 Haverford Avenue. The premiere screening event will open with a reception at 5 p.m., followed by the showing at 6 p.m., and a panel discussion immediately after.
The documentary was made possible by funding and support through the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia. It is also a project of MCCP’s Fine Art Through Our Eyes Community Arts Initiative.
Tyrell Biggs (in the white t-shirt) still schools young Philly boxers in the finer points of the sweet science at a gym in the basement of the Shepard Recreation Center near 57th and Haverford.
Tyrell Biggs was one of those dudes who may have hit his prime too early.
He was a starting forward on that legendary West Philadelphia High School basketball team that won a state record 68 straight games on its way to Public League and City titles in 1976-1978.
A few years later, as an amateur boxer, he won gold at the U.S. National Boxing Championships. In 1982 he won the amateur World Championships in Munich. Two years later his path to professional boxing was clear after he won gold in the super heavyweight division at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, beating future champ Lennox Lewis on his way to the title. He won his first 15 pro fights and got a shot at the title in 1987 but lost in a seventh-round TKO to Mike Tyson.
All by age 27.
For Tyrell Biggs boxing was a way up in life, as it still is for many kids in the city. But like many young people who get a lot of money at a young age, Biggs battled drug and alcohol addiction during much of his adult life. He is the subject of a feature documentary that you can help make happen calledWhatever Happened to Tyrell Biggs?(see video below).
Here’s the plot outline for the documentary, which is being produced by Lunchbox Communications (the crew that made Digital Dharma):
“In 1984, US Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist Tyrell Biggs is hailed as the second coming of Muhammad Ali. What should have been the dream launch of an international boxing legend in reality, marked the beginning of a long period of misfortunes, both in and out of the ring. This feature biopic explores one man’s fall from grace into the depths of despair that pushes him to vanish. Living in that territory in between fame and failure, Biggs confronts a struggle that lives within us all.” A good chunk of the production of this film is already complete, but the production team needs some help getting this important story about someone born and raised in West Philly.
When Mott Green founded the Grenada Chocolate Company Cooperative in 1999, it was his mission to not only make the “best chocolate in the world,” but also do so ethically and sustainably — “Tree to Bar,” as he put it.
The award-winning dark chocolate made by the small Hermitage, Grenada-based company is organic, produced by solar-power machinery built by Green’s hands. The operation is also a worker-owned coop, in business with small local cocoa farmers and as many as 50 factory workers, and offering employee shareholding and fair wages. It’s an ethical, sustainable model wholly in line with Green’s overarching personality the Washington-born, New York-raised activist dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s because he didn’t want to surrender to the confines of regular society. He spent much of his 20s squatting around West Philly and dedicating his time to homeless activism.
The work that Green, who died suddenly on June 1st at the age of 47 while working at his factory, committed his life to is also the subject of the 2012 documentary, Nothing Like Chocolate. Directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani and narrated by Susan Sarandon, the film tells the stories of Green and Nelice Stewart, an independent cocoa farmer in Grenada, and how the Caribbean island “has become home to this revolutionary venture”—an organic, ethical chocolate made in a country where chocolate productions is often a “dirty industry,” said Bull Gervasi, produce & facilities manager of Mariposa Food Co-op, which was one of the first in Philadelphia to sell Green’s chocolate bars 10 years ago. Grenada Chocolate Company is sold online and in stores across Europe and the States, with a flagship store recently opened in the Caribbean country. Continue Reading
Where does the food we eat come from? Two 11-year-olds are trying to find the answer to this question in a provocative and witty documentary about kids and food politics. What’s On Your Plate? is screening tonight at 6:30 p.m. at The Rotunda (4014 Walnut Street). Two girls, Sadie and Safiyah, take a close look at food systems in New York City and its surrounding areas. With the camera as their companion, the kids visit supermarkets, fast food chains, school lunchrooms and talk to their families, food activists, farmers, and the viewer in their quest to understand what’s on all our plates.
The film screening is part of monthly Food Justice Movie Night presented by The Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (AUNI). A free dinner and discussion about the food system in urban areas begin at 6 p.m.
Actor, mockumentarian and (now) documentary filmmaker Harry Shearer will be at the International House (3701 Chestnut St.) on Friday, July 22, to screen and discuss “The Big Uneasy,” his film about the real reasons behind the flooding and devastation of New Orleans.
Shearer’s work has ranged from the role of Derek Smalls in “This is Spinal Tap” to the voices of Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders on “The Simpsons.” He writes about “The Big Uneasy”:
“Media coverage of tragedies can become so pervasive that we no longer remember the tragedy anymore, we only remember the coverage. So if I say “New Orleans” and then say “flood” you immediately think “Katrina.” As in Hurricane. This is not your fault; it’s a reflex now, like your leg kicking upward when the doctor taps it. Only that tap is causing you to kick me, and my fellow New Orleanians, squarley in the crotch. The reason I made this film is because the hurricane did NOT cause the flood, despite what you have heard on the news. However, poor science and even poorer management did.”
The film begins at 7 p.m. and is 98 minutes long. Here is a trailer:
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