Selma director Ava DuVernay's next contribution to the film world may not include directing a Star Wars film but it will include the film collective she founded Array Releasing. Array Releasing will restore and release Ashes and Embers a 1982 film about an African-American Vietnam veteran "wrestling with a turbulent past and a chaotic political climate to make a future for himself," the Wrap writes.
Directed by Ethiopia's Haile Gerima, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1967, Ashes and Embers took home the FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin's International Film Festival in 1983. The film was never distributed in theaters.
Array executive editor Tilane Jones said of the release, "We, like many across the world, regard Mr. Gerima as a master filmmaker whose body of work asserts and amplifies the magnificence of black people in all our complexity. We are honored to release Mr. Gerima's rarely seen jewel Ashes and Embers at a time when the film's themes of cultural anguish and political unrest mirror contemporary issues that we face today."
Ashes and Embers will be restored and released in February through Array Releasing's Array Classics branch, which aims to show audiences rarely seen pieces of cinema like this one. The film will be screened Feb. 25 at Los Angeles' The Broad before it travels nationwide to The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC and New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. More screenings will be announced.
