IN CINEMA
RESTORATION RUN!
THE BLUES UNDER THE SKIN
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
SCREENING NIGHTLY at 7PM from Friday, July 12th through Thursday, July 18th
Roviros Manthoulis, 1973, 88 min.
Featuring performances by Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Furry Lewis, Mance Lipscomb, Brownie McGhee, Amelia Cortez, Jimmy Streeter, Roosevelt Sykes, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, Bukka White, and Robert Pete Williams!
In the early 1970s, during a resurgence of interest in the Delta blues, music documentarian Roviros Manthoulis traveled to the Mississippi Delta to capture on film the remnants of the authentic American blues. Traveling throughout the deep South, Manthoulis filmed candid interviews and intimate performances by such legends B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Bukka White, and Roosevelt Sykes. His objective was to not only document the music but also penetrate the surface of the blues and explore the emotional and sociopolitical factors that make it such an expressive and haunting musical form.
Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, THE BLUES UNDER THE SKIN dramatizes the tumultuous relationship of a young couple (Onike Lee and Roland Sanchez) as they struggle to overcome the barriers of poverty and prejudice that keep them from finding happiness together.
THE BLUES UNDER THE SKIN has never been commercially distributed in the United States, and to date has only enjoyed a handful of screenings in the 50 years since its completion. The film is a thrilling rediscovery, an untapped treasury of musical performances that not only captures a vanishing musical form, but offers a priceless glimpse of Black life in the rural South in the 1970s.
