NeoBlackCinema

American Black Film Festival

Trinity Goodheart Debuts on GMC and Kevin Hart’s Laugh at My Pain Comes to Theaters

Eric Benet and Erica Gluck star in a unique and heart warming story of an unconventional father-daughter relationship, strained family ties and a spirit that helps them overcome it all.

Erica Gluck’s character, Trinity, is a precocious young lady who calls her father, played by Benet, by his first name in order to see him as a person and not just a father. We meet Benet, a single parent, the two mysteriously abandoned, fighting for his daughter’s rights and individuality at school. Her attendance has suffered but her performance has not. When Trinity wasn’t in school, she was with her surrogate family in her father’s shop where she makes paper angels, a wildly popular item. Yet she doesn’t want to accept a profit for the items, demonstrating the character of her upbringing “If you have to believe in something, it might as well be something good.”

The films’ conflict arises in the strain between Benet’s character and his parents who have distanced themselves from the pair. Trinity boldly reaches out to her grandfather for full family reconciliation, one of the major themes of the made for TV movie.

Benet, debuting as a dramatic leading man, describes the film’s message as motivating “everyone in a positive, loving direction towards healing the relationships they have.”

GMC, formerly the Gospel Music Channel, debuted Trinity Goodheart, the first original feature film for the network on August 20, 2011.

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Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain

Kevin Hart sat at the top of the dark Colony Theater when his film, Laugh at My Pain, debuted at the American Black Film Fest. The film opened in the United States on September 10^th. The film, shot in a documentary …

The Feast of All Saints

India Arie sings of the love of brown skin, Dove commercials are plentiful in promoting “Loving the skin you’re in,” and the African-American community still struggles with the love of color. In The Feast of All Saints (Anne Rice), this love of color and heritage is magnified through the stories of the main characters. Black, White, Passe Blanc, this movie details the internal and external struggles of the Creole culture.

Marcel Ste. Marie (Robert Richard) plays a young Creole gentlemen whose father is a white plantation owner and whose mother is a gens de couleur (free people of color). Marcel grows up in a society that does not have the privileges of its white counterpart, but has more than its slave counterpart. The gens de couleur consider themselves neither white nor black. The women were often placed in left-handed marriages to white men (placage) and set up with homes and the means to keep up their lifestyle.

What is prevalent in this movie is not only the love of heritage, but also the love of status. Even though the gens de couleur could not vote and would be treated the same as the slaves if they left New Orleans, they …