Wanda’s Picks Special Broadcast: The New Black

This morning we have a special broadcast featuring awardwinning director, Yoruba Richen, documentary filmmaker who has directed and produced films in the United States, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Yoruba’s award-winning film, Promised Land, premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Festival and has screened at numerous festivals around the world. It received a Diverse Voices Co-Production fund award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and won the Fledgling Fund Award for Social Issue Documentary. Yoruba has produced for the investigative unit of ABC News and the independent news program Democracy Now. In 2007, Yoruba won a Fulbright Award in filmmaking and traveled to Salvador, Brazil, where she began production on Sisters of the Good Death, a documentary about the oldest African women’s association in the Americas and the annual festival they hold celebrating the end of slavery. In 2012, Yoruba won the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award and became a Guggenheim fellow. She is a graduate of Brown University and teaches Documentary film at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.  She joins us to talk about her recent film, The New Black, which debuts theatrically on Public Broadcasting's POV today. The documentary tells the story of how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the recent gay marriage movement and the fight over civil rights.The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community’s institutional pillar – the black church – and reveals the Christian right wing’s strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political agenda. TNB tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality in Maryland. Rebroadcast is an interview with Margo Hall about her musical memoir, Bebop Baby.