Part of Restoration Roundup
In his second film, following his debut KILLER OF SHEEP, Charles Burnett created a tragicomic masterpiece of realism. Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) is employed at his parents’ South Central dry cleaners with no prospects for the future — his childhood buddies are all in prison or dead. Pierce’s best friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell) is just getting out of jail. Pierce’s brother Wendell (Monte Easter), an up-and-coming lawyer, is busy planning a wedding to a snooty upper-middle-class Black woman named Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett, who co-produced the film). Pierce’s pious, Bible-touting mother (Jessie Holmes) provides occasional comic relief but also a heartfelt moral backbone to the film, as she urges Pierce to accept his responsibility to his family. When Soldier is killed in a car accident, Pierce’s conflicting obligations to family and friends becomes manifested in the choice between his brother’s wedding and his best friend’s funeral — both falling on the same day.
MY BROTHER’S WEDDING has been digitally restored and remastered by Milestone Films in collaboration with UCLA Film & Television Archive and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Funding provided by: Milestone Films, Kino Lorber, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Laboratory services: Prasad Corp North America, Deluxe Audio. The restoration was supervised by Charles Burnett in consultation with Jillian Borders and Maya S. Cade
“Watching this revitalization of the director’s picture is like spending your entire life seeing the world in black and white and being introduced to color. It’s like an entirely different film…. Seeing the film in this form is like a good polish revealing the former luster of a priceless heirloom. MY BROTHER’S WEDDING is the quintessential example of Burnett’s status as a premiere intergenerational storyteller.” —Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com
“Quite a lot happens in MY BROTHER’S WEDDING, but the story may be less important than the faces and voices of the actors and the subtlety of their interactions. They are involved, with Mr. Burnett and his crew, in a project of making art out of materials and inspirations that lie close to hand. And the result is a film that is so firmly and organically rooted in a specific time and place that it seems to contain worlds.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times
“In his films, Burnett maintains this culture of storytelling, and an intrinsic understanding of the importance of the mundane, translating it to the screen.” —Adria R. Walker, The Guardian