VOODOO MACBETH

/ / 2022, Feature Films, Virtual

Virtual + In-Person Showing 
2020 | USA | 108 min | Narrative
Directors: Agazi Desta, Christopher Beaton, Dagmawi Abebe, Ernesto Sandoval, Hannah Bang, Roy Arwas, Sabina Vajraca, Tiffany Kontoyannis, Victor Alonso-Berbel, Zoe Salnave
Producers: Miles Alva, Xiaoyuan Xiao, Jason Phillips
Editor: Takashi Uchida

1936 Harlem is a neighborhood battered by economic strife and hardship. With FDR’s New Deal providing funding for the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Unit, director Rose McClendon convinces co-director John Houseman to help her bring Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to the Harlem community at the Lafayette Theater — with an all-Black cast. They choose for their groundbreaking production a gifted but untested 20-year-old director by the name of Orson Welles, whose reimagined Haitian vision for the Scottish play is as daring and fresh as the cast and crew themselves.

Based on true events surrounding the Negro Theatre Unit’s revolutionary 1936 production of “Macbeth,” this is the story of a group of committed artists as they set out to create what is now considered a landmark event in African-American theatrical history.

Other Films