Mississippi Damned
We went to see the sneak preview of the New Orleans Afrikan Film Festival at the African Museum last night and watched Mississippi Damned, a wretching but well wrought tale of growing up poor in the South. I could add growing up black, growing up gay, growing up talented, growing up different, growing up with people who are so stuck in a pattern of life that doesn’t serve any one of them.
This is not a film you go to on date night, as we did last night, it’s a film that will leave you gut tangled, a story that will leave you sad much in the same way Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina did, and it is a reality that probably echoes through the yellow Southern pines more often than we’d all like to admit down here.
I saw so many mirrors everywhere, from Director, Screenwriter Tina Mabry looking way too much like Felicia Pearson from The Wire, to the way all families that are passionate are fucked up in the same way as mine was, is, to how alcoholism destroys so many people’s lives not just the one doing the drinking, to poverty, to kids, to oh my god make it stop. I was fascinated by how Tina was able to get her entire family to sign off on their portrayal in this harrowing tale, but she said they did it because they support her.
Even though the family held her enmeshed and caused her to stumble, it is them she still feels strong ties to much like when the NOA Fest showed the Prodigal Son and that family stayed together against all odds. My family wasn’t strong enough to stay together in the same bond – the glue, my father, thinned greatly after his death, and then by the time my mom passed, there was nothing even tacky enough to stick.
The film is available on Showtime and I believe via DVD on the site. Watch it but brace yourself, it is unrelenting and so flawlessly acted, you feel as if you are right there with these people, living their drama moment by moment.