What the Success of “Precious” Means for Black Indie Cinema

Could "Precious" open the door for black indie filmmakers or push them further into nichedom?

Since premiering at Slamdance 2009, “Mississippi Damned” has won major prizes at several film festivals, including those that have been black-focused (Urbanworld, American Black Film Festival), gay-themed (OutFest, NewFest) or for general audiences (Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago), and garnered enthusiastic critical acclaim — “magnificently thesped” (Variety), “tightly wound and powerfully explosive” (Hollywood Reporter). And yet, “that’s not enough,” says Stiff, “because no one is thinking outside the box.”

Lance Hammer, director of last year’s critically acclaimed “Ballast,” another artfully crafted tale about Mississippi lives, agrees. He says the audience for black arthouse films is small because the industry hasn’t helped to nurture it. “It’s a self-perpetuating problem,” he explains. “Because the audience is small, distributors stay away. Because distributors stay away, it is very difficult to obtain financing. Because it’s so difficult to obtain financing, there are very few black arthouse films produced. Because there are so few black arthouse films produced, an audience base cannot develop.”

“A Good Day to Be Black & Sexy” director Dennis Dortch agrees. “The general consensus is there is no black indie audience, while there was never any real attempts to seek out and cultivate one either.”

The success of “Precious” may show for the first time that there’s an effort to broaden that audience — or not; one could call the success of Daniels’ film as a new way forward for African-American cinema, or simply one derived from the already popular appeal of Tyler Perry’s “chitlin’” cinema.

Whatever the case, the filmmakers contend that an audience exists for more varied points of view. “We want to see ourselves reflected on the screen in fresh and innovative ways just like our white counterparts,” says Dortch. “White folks are up to their necks with hip and quirky films validating their existence every year. To believe that a black audience with the same desire does not exist is silly.”

But Stiff recognizes that the situation is unique when it comes to black audiences. Though not a monolithic entity, of course, she says black audiences are often uncomfortable with seeing “flawed’ black characters. “Because we only have limited ways we see black people in film and TV, how they are seen becomes very important,” she says. (A similar phenomenon occurred historically in gay cinema, when, for example, Gregg Araki or Tom Kalin’s troubled homosexual characters drew criticism within the gay community for portraying gays in a negative light.) The only way to counteract this resistance from black audiences, says Stiff, is to produce a more diversified slate of African-American movies.

Historically, however, box office figures haven’t shown much support for a range of films about African-Americans. Recent movies like “American Violet,” an earnest race-themed drama starring Alfre Woodard and released by Samuel Goldwyn, stalled in theaters this summer, while the comedic blaxploitation homage “Black Dynamite,” just released by Apparition, hasn’t found an audience. Last year’s musical drama “Cadillac Records,” which even starred Beyoncé, also failed to gain much momentum, despite critical support.

Would these films’ fates have been different if they were released post-”Precious”?

Morgan Stiff says the future of “Mississippi Damned” rests on the performance of “Precious.” “If it does well, it will show that people are ready for something different and distributors will take a risk on something different,” she says.

But “Black and Sexy’s” Dortch isn’t so sure. “I don’t expect a white-run entertainment industry to run in and save the day for black indie films. It’s not in their specific cultural interest to do so,” he says. He believes distributors would rather take these films straight-to-DVD, because it’s an “easy low-risk way for them to distribute the few black indie films that drop in.” As an alternative, Dortch believes “the path of least resistance is about figuring out how to distribute these films ourselves directly to our audience on a regular basis,” he says. And that, he adds, “is the same general challenge that most indie filmmakers face.”

[Additional photos: "Medicine for Melancholy," IFC Films, 2008; "Cadillac Records," TriStar Pictures, 2009]

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