BLACK GOLD is back at it again! Celebrating the best of black cinema and its icons from then ’til now, Black Gold invites you to join us Thursday, July 19th for a screening of Spike Lee’s CROOKYLN!

“Crooklyn (1994) is a jumble of dissonant moods. On one hand, Spike Lee’s eighth feature is a noisy, messy, and infectious Brooklyn street film; on the other, it is a dreamy and wistful memoir—but one that’s never overtly sentimental.

It is filtered primarily through the reminiscences of Joie Lee, who scripted the story—with older brother Spike and younger brother Cinqué—about growing up in pre-gentrification 1970s Bedford-Stuyvesant. Zelda Harris plays Troy, a quiet but self-possessed little girl saddled with four brothers and a struggling musician father, Woody (Delroy Lindo), who leaves the breadwinning to his tough-loving schoolteacher wife, Carolyn (Alfre Woodard).

Revelatory in its warmth and exuberance, Crooklyn altered perceptions about Lee as a filmmaker whose default mode had been anger, and who had been criticized for depicting women primarily in terms of their sexuality. His harnessing of visual stratagems to evoke the sensory experience of his little-girl heroine revealed a tender empathy.

Crooklyn evokes nostalgia for the Bed-Stuy of crowded brownstone stoops, for water hydrants broken open to beat the heat, and for street games like hopscotch and jump-rope. Those were the days, Crooklyn proclaims. They were the Lee family’s equivalent of what the poet A.E. Housman, thinking of pastoral England, called “the land of lost content…the happy highways where I went/And cannot come again.” It was obviously possible, in the 1970s, to walk such highways in inner-city Brooklyn.”

— The Culture Trip

7:30 PM: PRE-SHOW

8:00 PM: FILM STARTS

There will be prizes!