4.6 • 639 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2009
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Medicine for Melancholy, the debut film from writer-director Barry Jenkins, takes a dreamy contemplative look at a young African American couple in San Francisco. It's a black art film when art films are in trouble.
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0:00.0 | From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment. |
0:13.8 | Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com. |
0:18.3 | The film Medicine for Melancholy made a big splash on the independent film festival |
0:22.7 | circuit last year. And it's writer-director, Barry Jenkins, is sitting right across from me at KQ. |
0:27.2 | U.D. in San Francisco. Barry, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. I mean, I saw the |
0:31.3 | film in South by Southwest last year. It seemed like it was the perfect festival for a film like this. Yeah, I think everything we did was tailored towards taking the movie to South by Southwest. |
0:41.1 | We just felt like, you know, the characters in the film, the music, all those elements. |
0:45.4 | You know, 20% of the bands on the soundtrack are bands that are based in Austin, |
0:49.9 | which is something that really just happened by chance. |
0:52.5 | So, yeah, it was great to premiere the movie there. |
0:55.5 | If I can ask you to explain what the movies about it, because it's kind of a bare-bones story anyway, |
1:00.0 | because you can do that. Yeah, it's really simple. The movie is about a guy and a girl will have a one-night stand. |
1:05.1 | The movie starts the morning after. The guy wants everything to do with the girl. The girl wants |
1:10.7 | nothing to do with the guy. |
1:12.0 | And so, of course, they spend the next 24 hours getting to know one another and the city of San Francisco, |
1:17.8 | which eventually becomes more than just the backdrop for the film, but really like the motivator and like the third character in this love triangle. |
1:25.2 | And it's interesting because, you know, whenever there is, especially a male African-American |
1:29.4 | character in a film, there's an accepted wisdom that he's going to be angry. |
1:32.9 | And he does carry some anger, but the anger is not about race, but in fact, about his own state |
1:37.0 | of being kind of lost. |
1:38.8 | It was really important to me to put these characters on the screen because I felt like |
1:42.8 | I hadn't seen them in a movie |
... |
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