MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY

]]>PROPOSITIONS]]>
Selected examples of a New Cinema

A love story of bikes and one-night stands told through two African-American twenty-somethings dealing with issues of class, identity, and the evolving conundrum of being a minority in rapidly gentrifying San Francisco - a city with the smallest proportional black population of any other major American city.
Medicine For Melancholy is a simple, straightforward film that illuminates the modern complexities of living as a declining minority in one of America's major cities. With mass media's representation of the African-American experience being limited to unprecedented degrees and gentrification displacing them from the cultural centers of American cities with unchecked speed, being Black demands a struggle to assert and identify oneself on one's own terms in a manner on par with historically lesser represented minorities. In this meek story of a random encounter, the film explores the process of negotiating one's identity by illustrating how the effects of gentrification make it virtually impossible for minority urbanites to just «be». (Barry Jenkins)

This film is screened together with A.Effect.