Throughout Deantoni Parks’ 20-plus-year career as a prolific, experimental drummer and record producer, he has collaborated with luminaries such as Flying Lotus, Sade, and more deeply with the Velvet...
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Vee Hua 華婷婷With the COVID-19 pandemic has come many emotions, not least of which is grief. Grief in the sense of loneliness, loss, and confusion; grief in the sense of isolation. In her stop-motion music video for “Anhedonia,” Brooklyn-based artist Cressa Beer...
Written and compiled by Brooklyn-based artist, sound healing therapist, and meditation teacher Lavender Suarez, Transcendent Waves is a delightfully experimental new book which pays homage to the creative power of deep listening and the potential...
Judy NelsonBeyond Beyond Is Beyond is a record label that has become adept at curating artists for a very specific roster. These artists tend to not have the typical “Brooklyn” sound; what critics usually associate with Brooklyn tends be a trendy...
“I had a big manifesto of ‘no’s’ at the beginning, [of things] that I didn’t want to do.” As a composer, violinist, and multi-instrumentalist, Christopher Tignor has, since the early ’00s, led the New York...
Strangers, Marissa Nadler’s second record for Brooklyn-based Scared Bones and seventh overall, mixes elements both familiar and unfamiliar to create an uneven, but often rewarding listen. As with the best of her prior work, the songs that hit...
Eight years into its existence, Northside Festival is determinedly future-minded. Dividing itself into thirds, the NYC festival has two- and three-day stretches dedicated to “innovation” and “content”. The other third —...
With each passing year, Northside Festival ups the ante, taking over more northern Brooklyn venues and gaining more and more international recognition. Now in its 8th year, the festival added their Innovation track a few years back, which seems like...
![Nana Mensah Interview: Queen of Glory Expertly Blends Humor and Pathos in a Ghanaian-American Family Story
READ THE INTERVIEW
by @alison.j.smith:
https://bit.ly/redefinenana
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As writer-director-actor Nana Mensah @itsnanamensah of Queen of Glory explains, she wanted to reimagine ubiquitous narratives of flailing young adults. “A lot of times with that quarter-life crisis genre, people are just making enough money to buy the weed and pay the rent, and that wasn’t really my experience,” Mensah explains. “[With] my experience, especially being the child of West African immigrants, there was never going to be an opportunity to kind of coast à la Slackers. So I thought it’d be so interesting to have a character who is experiencing this quarter-life crisis and also is holding it down at work. I don’t think we get to see women be on top of their game in their profession and then perhaps falling apart in their personal life.”
“I interviewed some directors and spoke about the project in the very beginning, and they all had takes that were super interesting, but they just weren’t the film that I was looking to make,” Mensah explains. “I wasn’t doubling down on the strife narrative of what it is to be Black and a woman and from the Bronx. I wanted it to be a little more nuanced – a little bit more dynamic.”
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Out now on @filmmovement - screening at @thegrandcinema in Tacoma starting August 16, with other national dates throughout the summer.
#NanaMensah @queenofgloryfilm #NewYorkArtist #NewYorkArtists #NewYorkFilmmaker #NewYorkFilmmakers #NYCArtist #NYCArtists #NYCFilmmaker #NYCFilmmakers #BlackArtist #BlackArtists #BlackFilmmaker #BlackFilmmakers #QueenOfGlory #GhanianAmerican #Ghana #GhanianFilm #Ghanian #GhanianFilms #Humor #Dramedy](https://scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/297690839_181512530947907_2538323346777474592_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=1bdpqS_hp2MAX8sDo3x&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT9VQ-5dY6edX-gbPLauiLzFNlU8er3ZP4wNOnG5FNbOJg&oe=62FE656B)
