Ernest Hardy

Pan African Film Fest Has Added Relevance in the Wake of Ferguson

Ernest Hardy
The Pan African Film Festival has long been one of L.A.'s most important festivals, showcasing films from the African diaspora that other fests ignore or shortchange. This year, however, the festival has a heightened relevance, as a new generation of young activists is taking on institutional and systemic anti-blackness —......

Outfest Preview 2014

Ernest Hardy
There can be little doubt that we are at (maybe even just past) the tipping point of a global shift in awareness of LGBT issues. Heightened activism related to trans visibility, gay marriage, workplace protection and bullying is taking place around the world. That doesn't mean the news is all......

The Heart Animates MS Doc When I Walk

Ernest Hardy
"Wherever you live in this world, basically … you are alone. Even if have support systems, we're really alone." Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered — and received — as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture......
City of the Damned

Outfest Fusion Spotlights LGBT Filmmakers of Color

Ernest Hardy
As Pui, a young Taiwanese girl, roughhouses with some neighborhood boys on the street outside her home, the camera cuts to her mother — stern face, arms folded, staring intently at her child. A short while later, the two are shown in a surgically sterile kitchen as the mother tutors......
Grisgris; Credit: PHOTO COURTESY OF PILI FILMS

L.A.'s Pan African Film Fest Has a Particularly Strong Lineup This Year

Ernest Hardy
Two days after returning from the Jan. 18 funeral of writer, activist, scholar and soothsayer Amiri Baraka, Pan African Film Festival co-founder and longtime director Ayuko Babu told L.A. Weekly, "The Pan African Film Festival would not have been created or sustained if not for Brother Baraka's input. He played......
Kevin Jerome Everson; Credit: PHOTO BY PAMELA PECCHIO

The Lives of Black Americans, Depicted Via a Single Alabama Dry Cleaners

Ernest Hardy
There’s a lovely scene in Kevin Jerome Everson’s documentary Quality Control in which a seamstress chats with customers and co-workers, threads her sewing machine with balletic dexterity and charms the viewer with her Southern accent and down-home manner. It’s one of the film’s few nods toward convention; dialogue, rhythm and......