Congratulations to Dennis Dortch, Director of “A Good Day To Be Black & Sexy”, who has been nominated as BREAKTHROUGH DIRECTOR in the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards taking place December 2, 2008 in New York City.
The first major awards of the film season, the Gotham Awards™ are juried and provide critical early recognition to worthy independent films. Past winners include JUNO (2007), HALF NELSON (2006), JUNEBUG (2005), all of which went on to numerous awards and Oscar™ nominations for their stars — Ellen Page, Ryan Gosling, and Amy Adams, respectively.
A GOOD DAY TO BE BLACK AND SEXY will screen at the 2008 AFI Film Festival on November 5th and November 7th.
African-American writer-director Dennis Dortch’s smart, sensuous debut explores the ever-shifting balance of power in the tug of war between the genders. Set in Los Angeles over the course of one day, the film is composed of six vignettes about the intimate territory of sexual desire as played out in bedrooms, kitchens and the back seats of cars. Dortch’s take on black sexuality bears no trace of the old stereotypes as defined and analyzed in Donald Bogle’s seminal Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mamies & Bucks, a critical work on the history of black stereotypes in Hollywood. Instead, Dortch’s characters are dynamic, his dialogue raw and relaxed, and his visual aesthetic seductive. Some of the scenes are hilarious, most are familiar to romantics of any color, and Dortch elicits great performances from the strong women he has cast—Kathryn Taylor, Chonte Harris, Mylika Davis and Emily Liu. As much as the filmmaking draws, in style and attitude, from wonderful sources—there are nods to Melvin Van Peebles, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Spike Lee, French and Italian auteurs and ’90s independents—Dortch has crafted an original, irreverent and fresh American independent film.
