Mudbound

Screening in the New York Film Festival a little over a month after the white supremacist horror in Charlottesville, Dee Rees’s Mudbound has a shocking urgency. Charting the relationship between a black sharecropping family and a white landowning family in Mississippi during and immediately after World War II, the film is truly epic in scale and theme. In the new issue, Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at BAM and frequent Film Comment contributor, writes “Mudbound is thrillingly ambitious and complex, and features daring experimental flourishes, including a multicharacter narration that, while initially a touch overbearing, ultimately lends the film an apposite epistolary quality—repressed characters who are physically or emotionally adrift from their families are given voice, to powerful dramatic effect.” In this episode, FC Digital Producer Violet Lucca is joined by Clark and Eric Hynes, associate film curator at Museum of the Moving Image in New York, to discuss the film.