My Brother's Wedding

My Brother's Wedding poster

At the 1981 Berlin Film Festival, Killer of Sheep made a belated, but critically acclaimed debut, winning the esteemed "Critics' Prize". Interestingly, it was a fairly conservative public television network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (known for their emphasis on Das kleine Fernsehspiel — small family dramas) that saw it there and commissioned Burnett to make another film. With additional money from a Guggenheim fellowship and further support from England's Channel 4, the $80,000 budget was raised.

My Brother's Wedding began production in 1983. Burnett wrote, directed and produced this low budget independent film on location in the area of South Central Los Angeles where he grew up. Like Killer of Sheep and To Sleep with Anger, the locale and the personality of the neighborhood was as important as the characters.

As he told James Ponsoldt in a recent Filmmaker magazine issue, "Growing up, it was a constant clash. If you were from the South, people called you 'country.' It was a negative more than a positive. But if somehow you let those [Southern] values seep in, through osmosis or whatever, you look at your life and realize [they are] relevant."

"In the neighborhood where I grew up, the neighbors were like extended family. That's all missing now — most of it. Los Angeles is so urban now, but it used to be full of vast, open spaces. It was rural — like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn! You could see for miles. City Hall was the biggest building. You could see the mountains every day. You could have chickens, rabbits, ducks — anything — in your backyard."

It was a great place to be at that time. It felt country. There was a sense of community."

The film examines the differing duties of family and friends as well as the complexities of class within the black community. Trouble soon followed as the lead actor Everette Silas refused to continue acting until he was paid a larger salary. That took some time to settle but after a few more scenes were shot, Silas disappeared. He was found a few months later, having become a preacher in New Orleans. All in all, it took a full year of on-and-off shooting before the editing process began.

Burnett submitted a rough cut of the film — now past the original completion schedule — to Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Against Burnett's better judgment and wishes, ZDF decided this version was good enough. The "unfinished" film was shown at the New Directors/New Films festival in New York to mixed reviews, discouraging distributors and tragically relegating the film to relative obscurity.

Film critic Armond White called this "a catastrophic blow to the development of American popular culture. The 'suppression' of My Brother's Wedding damaged the cultural awareness of American artists (black and white) who learn from other contemporary achievements. American pop never got the chance to benefit from Burnett's experimentation and plangent worldview."

Other critics including Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Weekly as well as Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader also championed the film to no avail. The film was essentially lost to history, screened only infrequently at Burnett retrospectives. "People see a rough cut of it and I keep telling them I'm going to go back. So that's what I'm going to do. It needs recutting."

With the preservation by the Pacific Film Archive, distributor Milestone was able to acquire the rights and work out a scenario where Burnett and editor Ed Santiago were able at last complete a digital "final cut" — from 115 minutes to a trim 82 — My Brother's Wedding now is ready to be seen for what it has always been: funny, heartbreaking . and timeless.

From the Filmmaker

"My Brother's Wedding is a tragic comedy that takes place in South Central Los Angeles. The story focuses on a young man who hasn't made much of his life as of yet, and at a crucial point in his life, he is unable to make the proper decision, a sober decision, a moral decision."

"This is a consequence of his not having developed beyond the embryonic stage, socially. He has a distinct romantic notion about life in the ghetto and yet, in spite of his naive sensitivity, he is given the task of being his brother's keeper; he feels rather than sees, and as a consequence his capacity for judging things off in the distance is limited."

"This brings about circumstances that weave themselves into a set of complexities which Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), the main character, desperately tries to avoid."
- Charles Burnett

Website

Visit the My Brother's Wedding website for more information.

IMDB

The Internet Movie Database page for My Brother's Wedding.

Reviews

"My Brother's Wedding fits no genre. The film asks viewers to find its rhythm and move to it. What the Italian neorealists accomplished in the years after World War Two, and what a handful of daring Iranian directors have done more recently, Burnett — a one-man African-American New Wave — achieved with his first two features: he gave a culture, a people, a nation new images of themselves."
- Nelson Kim, Senses of Cinema

"The least known of Charles Burnett's first three features (the other two are Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger) and in some respects my favorite focuses on the family pressure exerted on a young man in Watts (Everette Silas) who works at his parents' dry cleaners — pressure to abandon his disreputable ghetto friends and adjust to a more middle — class existence."

"This struggle is pushed to the limit when he has to choose between attending his older brother's wedding to a woman from an affluent family and attending the funeral of his best friend, a former juvenile delinquent."

"Burnett's acute handling of actors (most of whom are nonprofessionals) never falters, and his gifts as a storyteller make this a movie that steadily grows in impact and resonance as one watches. If a better film has been made about black ghetto life, I haven't seen it."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader