Two sword-fighting men, one of whom always loses. A man with a screwdriver, electric wire and angelic patience, trying to break into a car. A group of young girls wearing raincoats on a boat trip along a waterfall.
Erie is made up of independent events filmed in black-and-white in the area around Lake Erie. They all last about the same length of time (10 minutes, the length of a roll of film) and they are edited back-to-back without any processing. Hardly any words are spoken, apart from (all the more) by three people working at the General Motors factory. The factory is soon going to close, like so many major steel and car companies — to the joy of those who thought that the untrained were earning much too much money. In this way, Erie fits in perfectly with the central theme in the sizeable oeuvre of Kevin Jerome Everson: the culture of Afro-American workers. — International Film Festival Rotterdam
Kevin Jerome Everson (1965, USA) studied Fine Arts at the Universities of Ohio and Akron. He is an artist and maker of numerous short films and five features about the working class culture of Black Americans and other people of African descent. In 2006, Everson was voted one of the 25 most important new faces in independent cinema by Filmmaker Magazine. — International Film Festival Rotterdam
The exhibition More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and will be on view
