Flicks in the City: Urban Film Series

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Click here to read an interview with featured Urban Film Series filmmaker Hotep, a.k.a. Hustle Simmons.

HOW DOES ONE STIMULATE one's intellectual palate when the late-night dorm-room conversations cease and the scruffy coffeehouse where you once held heated debates becomes a keyboard with a visible history of your lunch preferences?

While most of us long ago muffled our activist urges, Corey Jennings founded the Next Generation Awareness Foundation (NGAF).

"I took an assessment of what was going on," said Jennings, "and [found] that once everyone left college everything seemed to have stopped. We stopped bringing in people to talk to us and films to watch so we could continue to intellectualize and talk."

In the interest of rekindling old flames and sparking a few new ones, the NGAF rolls out the red carpet for the 2007 Urban Film Series Tour and Fourth Annual Film and Discussion Series this weekend.

For Jennings, creating a climate ripe for the sharing of ideas was crucial.

"It's critical to people being able to come together and feel comfortable and having a way of simply associating with each other, especially in a transient area," he said.

Other than film screenings and discussion panels, the celebrity-filled affair boasts live music, poetry and appearances by such notables as filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, actress Yvette Freeman, actor Joseph Marcell, musician Roy Ayers and Washington Wizards player and poet Etan Thomas. Van Peebles, Freeman and Ayers will receive the NGAF's first Spiritual Legacy Award.

Of the award, black film pioneer Van Peebles said: "When I started out, we African-Americans were marginalized in an interesting way: Our images were how other people looked at us. We didn't get a chance to say what we thought our universe was. This is what I dreamed of, that we would have a chance to control to an extent our own images. So I'm very pleased, I'm very proud and I'm very happy."

Anchored by the theme "We Remember," this year's film selections and discussion panels highlight the transformation of African-American society and individuals. By urging one to "remember" the foundation of the African-American community — which is "struggle and progress," according to Jennings — the series aims to empower.

So some films — including "How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Like It) ," about Van Peebles, and "The Edification of Weldon Irvine," chronicling the life of the late musician-composer — glance back.

Other films, such as Atlanta native Hotep's "Independent, Doin' Major Things," provide a glimpse of the African-American future via the current creative boom in his hometown. According to Hotep, a.k.a. Hustle Simmons, "equally as important as knowing who you are is believing that who you are is valuable."

» Various sites, tickets range from $10-$55; one-day, four-day and all-festival passes available; see urbanfilmseries.com for complete schedule.

Photos courtesy Urban Film Series