good evening and welcome to fistful of popcorn and the movie discussion show out of greater princeton new jersey i am bob brown the moderator tonight and with us are our usual panelists to my right is marilyn campbell and to my left are jet at stern and carol well and tonight we're going to discuss a film that's very low budget relatively speaking but very  intense film that takes place in miami and it's about a young man through various stages in his life and marilyn would you like to summarize forces a film called moonlight well this  that based on a play it so it has in fact a three act structure at first the first act is called little and it's about this young boy whose name is sharon sharon  who lives in that subsidized housing and it's somewhere in the miami area and and he's his he's very poor and he has no father a inside and he's picked on and bullied by other boys and he strikes up a sort of a friendship with a local drug dealer who becomes is mentor and and model of  y and that's the first act the second act is called it's called sharon on where we pick him up in middle school or high school or area he's a young teenager and he's still being picked on and he's trying to figure out in fact what his feelings are for me the opposite sex or the same sex he's he's he's a little unsure of what he's attractions are and and whether that's a bad thing or a good thing and if he gets into trouble with bullies at school and the third act is called black black or which is it nickname picked up been in middle school for my young man named kevin who was his only friend really and it turns out at this point he's been in prison he was in juvie for some sort of violence in high school and middle school and he went on to go to adult prison like many black men in america and now he's out and he's a successful drug dealer in atlanta he's moved when he gets a phone call from filming rather than the bare bones of the story now when i read a an abstract or summary of this film i thought i was not going to like it because it just seemed like it was going to be very away and it's a very interesting storytelling technique and then this is interesting because you think with the play well they're doing that because this too hard to act out a hook on stage but in this case of course it's a movie so i suppose they could have these scenes but in some ways what they leave valve makes everything that's on screen more intriguing while it concentrates you on parts of the story that maybe or it wouldn't be focused on in in a more traditional movie like going to prison where you know being arrested and going to prison would be a very dramatic kind of but that's not what the story is about you know it's focused on the characters and this particular character and what developed man is also about i think in answer to your question one of the things that sounded a little bit might might be of off putting was the fact that his mother is a crack addict and we're kind of used to we kind of have an idea of what that's going to be like and isn't going to be very it's going to be very hard to watch and and then and it is yeah but the other side of it is that she's getting her drugs from a drug dealer who's actually a very sympathetic passionate person yeah and so all of our preconceptions are shattered a bit and so we're really just finding out that people are multi dimensional which we kind of knew but we still tend to stereotype absolutely and i i think that's what makes this movie so interesting it's not you don't feel stereotypical you know the way you feel it's about individual people and i was surprised to read after one reads there are almost no white people maybe there are no i could say something about this setting because i lived in miami for a few you know the neighborhood he's from is a very specific neighborhood in miami called liberty city and it's almost like south central l a if you were in that neighborhood if you're not black you could be in danger and in fact i was in doing some business when i was in the service in that neighborhood i felt afraid for myself because a white insurance salesman who had been there a week before was shot and killed in the car and i was not on insurance business but i was i was thinking about i was going to make us late out of place shall we say wearing a business so i was afraid but this film shows own kind of makes you feel like he's been turned into a monster because of experiences but he kind of pulls a fast one on his his courier boy to say you know i was only kidding y dealings and he doesn't mean to do harm you mean he's a current person but that his situation is the situation and it turns out badly for him as you know that and in the last that you see the same thing is that he has a front of great toughness that he's had to put on to protect himself in prison and in life where he was bullied continuously through school he had to you know make himself look scary the on the first tack on who's a father figure teaches him to swim their teacher tells and you know he has to do what he needs to do to find himself his father figure he's drug dealing is the least significant part of his life it's what he has to do but his life is what he is trying to he's trying to be conventional he has a lovely little home with a very very nice girlfriend they eat good meals they you know that's who he wants to be but he's got to do something on the side to keep that going and that's another shattering of of the next i say ali and i yeah it's the drug dealing that doesn't fit in with the rest it's not that he is a drug and then she goes so suddenly it was a crack at the crack epidemic was horrifying in these communities because she went downhill from being a fairly respectable mother who wanted to raise her son properly to being someone who just what addiction was her only identity that she had she had left everything else behind him stripped her everything else off and it was just get some money get the drugs and that's the horrible side of addiction and in the in the last act where we see her living at a rehab facility where she's stayed on she's allowed to stay on it to help the other addicts because otherwise she would be pushed out and she know she deputy she can not be pushed out she needs that community to keep off drugs and she's also you know he's still she still addicted and she's just not using and that him and she has a heartfelt conversation with her son who she still wants to do well and she sees that the ways making his living isn't isn't isn't going to have a lot of a future but she she apologizes for what she's done to him but she can't change and she can't change him and transparent mirror of what's going on in their heads and they're able in fact that's acting to a this fictional story appear on their face as if it was their true self apparently the director didn't let any  all three of them act through their eyes they are saying and not with words now and sometimes as an audience member you're just dying for them to please say answer the question this person is trying to be nice to you answer the there it's like they can't allow the words to escape or someone will use them but i don't know what it is that they're so he's so cautious as a boy you know right the first the boy you see he he the  drug dealer finds him and trying to escape from belize he's in a crack house basically an empty crack house and he he goes in there and he tries say you know where do you live i want to take you home and the boy won't speak to him he's so  that they they thought what they wanted to convey was that he was afraid that if he it out those words his power could be taken oh sure i think it's not only growing up  and he doesn't know how to how to conceal it and but he doesn't even know what it is in that first scene and even in this second scene was a teenager it's not clear he knows what it is did well i thought it was a lovely scene where he asked the why on the drug dealer what does faggot me and you know the drug dealer really shows his true colors when he says it's a word people use to make homo sexual or gay people feel ashamed of themselves and i thought that was allegedly a disability you know and he's so withdrawn about that that it's surprising to us at the and as he's called black at the end but at black's life unfurls did you ever think back to lawn and wonder whether want it gone through the same things when he was a child or how this community shaped them to be to react  speaks he will give him dinner and make try to make him feel comfortable make try to make a feel safe and i think that that maybe speak to that he recognizes some sort of vulnerability in the boy that he ma recognize in himself perhaps perhaps i mean he he's such a one is such a charismatic character that you think maybe he might have been easier time of it as a kid but we don't now  yet that afternoon without having read anything about and you know why i signed it because i looked on d v d to see what sort of rating yeah it is it was very hard  yeah and when i did and looked at the description of the film i thought there's got to be something here because this is not the kind of film i would think would be popular or it actually was fairly low budget i think five million dollars it ok but five million has really quite but it's quite doing quite well actually i wanted to see it because it had done so well at the new york film festival and also toronto it came out of there as one of the lead films and people were praising see what sort of buzz it's gotten or if it's gotten a high rating if i see something and it's like six or below unless there's been a lot of talk or chatter about it i'm not interested in seeing this one that it's also refreshing to see a film that in fact doesn't have any white people in it and is about a community that feels like it comes out of the community instead of someone coming in and saying oh these poor people are drug addicts and drug dealers and they're poor and they go to prison and it isn't that terrible but more these are people they're struggling to make ends meet and they're struggling to make a life for themselves and these are the sorts of opportunities they have or don't have and what else they're just a human being and and it's too bad that their options true thing to say and he's he's very hopeful that he's going to make it work as a short order cook this is his you know highest aspiration you know what you could do when you've been in prison in the united states and you have no education and you and that's what i was going to say given the other dimension is the whole film really is about deciding who you are finding out who you are what's the definition of manhood what advantage is it that you you know what do you feel comfortable what what makes you feel comfortable and his identity became this cuban identity because he started to become very proud of cuban cooking and he was making all cuban foods so i thought that was interesting that he you know obviously embrace that somewhere so is how they talk about yeah so there's a bit of cultural cross fertilization here going on in this film too miami's a very interesting city because in that it's not it's american but it's so much more it's so many more elements of american society racially culturally so it's a great setting for an identity trying to write a line your identity with a larger  is what is america and the movie does have a great sense of place and i mean i don't know if we're enchanted but the director is from miami the playwright well the described i am a director and the playwright was the crack addict and his mother come lately had nothing to do with him from the time he was a little put by so he would sort of become insinuated in the neighbors homes because he didn't have a phone nobody could reach him no teachers no no school nobody could reach them so the neighbors sort of took him in because well we have a phone and they had their own children but that's what people did yeah yeah we had the tougher time and you know what a miracle sometimes filmmaker he said he started off kind of servant popcorn and ended up you know there making his own films and now he says he's back with his own his well this is the second feature film and he said but this is the story of my d but you know it's it's very european in that regard and many european films don't tie things off at the end and i think it's wonderful that it's open and it might have been i think i think it goes with the whole structure of the movie is that there are the these big gaps between you mean the acts in which things happen that have a great impact on this boy's life but we don't see them and at the end there's there's another gap we don't know where it's going to pick up but that backs the end of one phase of his life and it will continue in the way of life does and things will happen but i i thought the end was very yeah in the sense that you see these reconnected with kevin and there's the possibility after he's had a confrontation with his mother in the same act and she said i am sorry i mean i love you but i understand why you don't love me because i was terrible bother and i failed to and i'm sorry but that's you know that's can't do any good or bad we can't go backwards i'm sorry and and he sort of reconciles himself with that ok i said by piece she said her piece maybe we can just go on from this instead of keep you know poking at the wound and then he meets that there's a possibility that they'll have a relationship and because he's decided to go forward instead of going backwards he's decided that maybe emulating and of course black gets in his car drives all the way from atlanta to miami just to see cabin and they're driving the car and kevin says what you know i call you once and then you drive well especially just the same age and it and then you see in his eyes and he looks so vulnerable and you can see that how meaningful listens to him and his one friend as well and who is going on to i think that's also important that visually very gorgeous and wonderful sense of place wonderful characterisation this is a movie from the heart i highly recommend it go see it i did and everything i think we didn't spend any time talking about the cinematography there i think it's the point of them as they used the word before but it left me with such a feeling of tenderness and i guess i also thought it was very delicate we got and i agree with you janet that this in a retard would be kind of changed me and and that it was reflecting the intellectual or understanding of the boy at that time of his and his life in sort of the first it's very confusing here and the second is very confrontational in the last it's very very very dark why there's just there's a sort of it's called moonlight apparently because black boys look blue in the moonlight in the name and it was in a way the play so it's it's it's there it's about being blue