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SFFILM Festival

And when I die, I won’t stay dead

Directed by Billy Woodberry

USA/Portugal | 90

4 May
Wed, May 4, 2016 at 6:30 pm PT

Description

Contemporaries and devotees recall brilliant but largely unheralded Beat poet Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) in this rich documentary tribute to a singular individual. Rather than present a chronological recounting of his subject’s life, CalArts professor and filmmaker Billy Woodberry takes a looser approach that incorporates glimpses of the struggles and changes occurring in America during Kaufman’s active years. The director introduces the poet during his days as a mainstay among the Beat writers in San Francisco’s North Beach, opening a window back in time to that heady era with a free-flowing collage of black-and-white footage and still photographs, underscored by jazz and city soundscapes. Supplementing the archival material are interviews with Kaufman’s contemporaries, poets A.D. Winans and Jack Hirschman, as well as historian Gerald Horne and writer, editor and publisher Raymond Foye. The film also charts the drifting course that took Kaufman to San Francisco; from his childhood in New Orleans, as the son of a German Jewish father and a Black Catholic mother, to the years following WWII when he organized for the National Maritime Union. Woodberry dips memorably and meaningfully into each of these periods, sketching in the background of this enigmatic man. If one subscribes to the adage that a person is not really dead until he’s no longer remembered by the living, then thanks to this vivid cinematic portrait, Bob Kaufman’s titular declaration is emphatically true. —Laura Henneman

Director Billy Woodberry

Billy Woodberry is a video and multimedia installation artist who has taught at CalArts since 1989. Woodberry was a key figure in the LA Rebellion collective of Black filmmakers in the 1970s and ’80s, and his 1984 drama Bless Their Little Hearts (SFIFF 1984) was restored by UCLA in 2011 and placed on the National Film Registry in 2013.

Trailer

//player.vimeo.com/video/157228594?autoplay=1

Film Details

Language English

Year 2015

Runtime 90

Country USA/Portugal

Director Billy Woodberry

Producer Rui Alexandre Santos, Billy Woodberry

Editor Amir Manesh, Luís Nunes

Cinematographer Pierre Desir