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Discussing the Diaspora as seen through an internal Black lens
‘Barack & Curtis’: Short Film Juxtaposing Obama To 50 Cent
November 22nd, 2008
Up and coming filmmaker Byron Hurt in September created a documentary piece exploring the images of Black manhood comparing the new President-Elect to rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. The full name of the 10 minute short film is “BARACK & CURTIS: MANHOOD, POWER, AND RESPECT”
In a Reuters article says of Hurt and his film
“The only way that he (Obama) can make a substantial change is if he addresses things like poverty and joblessness and those deep pervasive factors that affect black boys and men,” said film maker Byron Hurt.
Hurt’s latest film, “Barack and Curtis”, is a 10-minute documentary released on the internet that compares the image projected by Obama with the image of Curtis Jackson, who is better known as the rapper 50 Cent.
The movie argues that Obama’s image, as an educated, family man is a stark contrast with that of 50 Cent, who made an album called “The Massacre” and is famous in part for having been shot nine times in a gang-related incident.
Even though Obama’s election was not a panacea for black men, the importance of the example he sets could not be underestimated, Hurt said in an interview.
“The boost that he has given black men is more symbolic than anything else,” said Hurt. “But I don’t want to undervalue symbolism and image. When I see images of Barack Obama in a baseball hat taking his daughters to school … that is a powerful image.”
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Director’s Statement
BARACK & CURTIS: MANHOOD, POWER, AND RESPECT
September 16, 2008
I am proud to be a part of the Black Masculinity Project, a project of the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC). Like many other filmmakers who applied for this, I was required to submit to them three ideas for a short documentary (10 minutes or less) that examined various aspects of black masculinity. Of the three ideas I had, NBPC chose the one that was actually a last minute idea.
Read full statement at Hurts site…
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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Simply brilliant.
It was a good ideal.
Powerful, startling, and possibly beyond me.
But as a fiction writer, I need to think outside my own skin. And determining what’s presumption; what’s imagination; what’s real and what’s advertised is what makes a story serious, even if it’s funny–it has to show what’s really what for everybody.
So, off the top of my head: “what’s difficult I can do right now; the impossible may take a while.”