Oakland Underground Film Festival | Opening Night

Submitted by the Event Organizer

The Oakland Underground Film Festival in partnership with Jack London Square presents an exciting spring and summer series of films, performances, and art installations. Join us in the amazing 33,000 square-foot waterfront Pavilion Theater (98 Broadway, Jack London Square) to enjoy some of the very best local filmmakers, projection and installation artists, musicians, and surprise guest speakers.

FRIDAY APRIL 23, 2010 – FREE ADMISSION

7:30PM – EVERYDAY BLACK MAN (105 min.)
Dir. Carmen Madden, 2009
Filmmaker in attendance

Since closing the door to a violent past, quiet and thoughtful Moses Stanton’s existence is running a small neighborhood store, and watching over his daughter who doesn’t know he exists. When a young man, Malik, comes in claiming to be a black Muslim that is doing good for the neighborhood, Moses takes him on as a partner but soon realizes that Malik is nothing but a drug dealer seeking to destroy the neighborhood and Moses’s daughter. Therefore, Moses must become the man he used to be in order to save his beloved neighborhood and his daughter.

9:30 PM – A DAY LATE IN OAKLAND (26 min.)
Dir. Zachary Stauffer, 2009
Filmmaker in attendance
Young Chauncey Bailey

On the morning of August 2, 2007, a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a shotgun walked up to a local reporter named Chauncey Bailey and shot him three times. It happened in the United States, where a journalist hasn’t been murdered for his work since 1993. The next day, 200 police rushed the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery, a business that was long seen as a bastion of black empowerment in Oakland, California. Political and civic leaders embraced the bakery throughout its nearly 40-year history, despite its troubling and hidden legacy of violence and abuse. Mixing interviews with archival footage, photographs, news clippings, and public documents, A Day Late in Oakland follows Bailey’s life and the evolution of the bakery, from their common roots to their troubling intersection.

A LIFE TAKEN (45 min)
Dir. by Josh Banville, 2010
Filmmaker in attendance

For Shawn Drumgold 1989 was a roller coaster year. He proposed to his high school sweetheart, had a baby girl, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In a prison visiting room, with guards acting as his witnesses, he exchanged vows with his wife and made her a promise: he would return home. Fifteen years later Shawn Drumgold made good on his word.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.