LaLee's Kin: The Legacy Of Cotton

Green Screen Film Series presented
Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
The Academy Award-nominated Film by Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson
and Albert Maysles, Director of Gimme Shelter & Grey Gardens

About the Film:

LaLee's Kin explores the legacy of generations of African-Americans who toiled in the cotton industry in the Mississippi Delta — a hardscrabble life of poverty and virtual illiteracy. LaLee Wallace, a former cotton picker retired on disability, is a great-grandmother struggling to support and encourage her family, while Reggie Barnes, a crusading superintendent, strives to save the failing West Tallahatchie school system from takeover by the state. LaLee's Kin adheres to the rigorous and sober-minded Maysles tradition of presenting things as they are without editorializing.

About the Filmmaker: Albert Maysles is an award-winning documentarian and a Guggenheim fellow. Along with his brother David, he brought us the cult classics Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1976). The Maysles have also worked extensively with celebrated artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose monumental environmental projects were documented in Academy Award-nominated Christo's Valley Curtain (1974), Running Fence (1978), Islands (1986), Christo in Paris (1990), and Umbrellas(1995). In addition to being nominated for an Academy Award in 2001, LaLee's Kin received the Sundance Film Festival 2001 Cinematography Award for Documentaries and the DuPont Columbia Gold Baton Award in 2004.

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