Part of Music City Mondays
In the early 1970s, during a resurgence of interest in the Delta blues, music documentarian Roviros Manthoulis traveled to the Mississippi Delta to capture on film the remnants of the authentic American blues. Traveling throughout the deep South, Manthoulis filmed candid interviews and intimate performances by such legends B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Bukka White and Roosevelt Sykes. His objective was to not only document the music but also penetrate the surface of the blues — exploring the emotional and sociopolitical factors that make it such an expressive and haunting musical form.
Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, THE BLUES UNDER THE SKIN dramatizes the tumultuous relationship of a young couple (Onike Lee and Roland Sanchez) as they struggle to overcome the barriers of poverty and prejudice that keep them from finding happiness together.
“A forgotten documentary featuring many of the genre’s most influential voices…. The film never received a theatrical release in the United States and has existed for 50 years as a piece of lost media available only to the most diligent scholars and archivists who could track down a copy.” —Christian Zilko, IndieWire