World Premiere!
ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL
5pm Saturday, March 29
@ Michigan Theater (Main Auditorium)
http://aafilmfest.org/52/events/from_deep
Canadian Premiere + Closing Night Film!
IMAGES FESTIVAL (Toronto, ON)
9pm Saturday, April 19
@ Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
http://www.imagesfestival.com/calendar.php?event_id=1265&month=n
Artist Talk: Jennifer Chan + Brett Kashmere
IMAGES FESTIVAL (Toronto, ON)
3pm Thursday, April 17 @ 401 Richmond Street Bldg
http://www.imagesfestival.com/calendar.php?event_id=1244&month=n
From the IMAGES FESTIVAL catalogue:
Brett Kashmere’s cultural history of basketball is woven together from hundreds of clips from movies, music videos, television and video games alongside his own footage of neighborhood street and playground games. Shifting, as Kashmere describes it, “between essay and mixtape,” the film balances exhaustive research with immensely entertaining pop culture source material. The film traces the game’s evolution from its invention in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891 (by Canadian expat James Naismith) through its transformation to the urban game it is today. Kashmere ties this history to his own – growing up as a white kid in the Canadian Prairies, an outsider to the sport but one drawn to the culture surrounding the game.
At the film’s centre is the parallel ascent of hip hop and basketball in the 1980s highlighted in songs like Kurtis Blow’s Basketball and Run-DMC’s My Adidas. Kashmere traces these threads as independent yet symbiotic cultural phenomena, as forces that have shaped American life today, as windows through which we can perceive American society. From Deep is both an appreciation of the game, its history and aesthetics and an incisive analysis of its culture–ranging from the economic system of star players as commodities and brands to the complexities of race in the game’s popularity and marketing and the tremendous influence of the game on so many facets of American life in the last generation.