Hello, my name's Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And this week, we're talking about Charles Burnett.

We're getting back to our mandate of important cinema. And ones that are difficult for us to talk about.

We should say, you know, off the bad, acknowledge the obvious, which is that we are two white Canadians talking about films that are, to their very core, African American. Before picking this topic, I had never seen any of his films. I think you had mentioned that you had seen Killer of She right yes i had uh and i liked it and i

still like it so um charles burnett is a guy that usually you see pop up in textbooks when

talking about african american cinema not that often people seeing his films and discussing them

he's also often on those lists of like the greatest filmmakers you've never heard of or the greatest

filmmakers who have only made a certain number of movies. And I mean, his first one, killer of

sheep, one of the reasons that he probably got so much buzz around him is that for a long time it was

not commercially available. Yeah, it was seen, you know, by I guess specialists or people really

in the know on kind of dingy 16

millimeter prints. And the reason it was never released was because it has a really stacked soundtrack. It's got Earthwind and Fire. It's got, I don't know, Paul Robeson is on it. A ton of a ton of other people whose music costs money. And Burnett said that at the time that he was making it, it's such like a film school kind of thing.

He's like, I want to make this movie a history of like African American music.

And so it's just dropping tracks when he made it of whatever he had on hand.

But when it finally went out to release, people are like, you cannot get the rights of this music.

So it took till 2007.

Well, Milestone put it out. With Steven Soderberg presenting it.

I believe Steven Soderberg dropped a big chunk of change, which was part of the total $150,000

to be able to clear that music to get it out there. So thank you, Steven Soderberg.

And it was one of those movies that when it happened, like it popped up on a bunch of people's top 10 list, blah, blah, blah, blah. People

rediscovered it and like, this is an important piece of work. But let's get back to who is Charles

Burnett. He was born in Mississippi, but from an early age, his family moved to Watts, where he

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