My Brother's Wedding
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Charles Burnett
Everett Silas
Jessie Holmes
Gaye Shannon-burnett
Ronald E Bell
Dennis Kemper
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
A man must decide between attending his brother's wedding or attending the funeral of an ex-con friend he vowed to look after.
Director
Charles Burnett
Cast
Everett Silas
Jessie Holmes
Gaye Shannon-burnett
Ronald E Bell
Dennis Kemper
Sy Richardson
Frances Nealy
Sally Easter
Hobert Durham Jr.
Angela Burnett
Tim Wright
Cora Lee Day
Monte Easter
Garnett Hargrave
Margarita Rodriguez
Jackie Hargrave
Linda Gypsy Lewis
Denise Elliot
Ross Harris
Julie Bolton
Charles Bracy
Stacey Evans
Nate Hardman
Debbie Williams
Henry G Sanders
Helena Springs
Lucious Walker
Taglito Atpay
Edwin Prevost
S'jon C L Blackwell
Larry White
Kal Isaacs
Kalita Bradley
Herman Graham
Demean Hall
Mickie Washington
Gene Cherry
Dian Cherry
Charles Anderson
Jerry White
Tamiko Hairston
Boston Farley Jr.
John R Lampkin
James Washington Jett
Robert T Wester
Tashia Cherry
Allahn Diva Wright
Rashawn Robinson
Tina Jolly
Thomas M Penick
Rosalind Burroughs Cluster
Clifton Johnson
Victor Hargrave
Rita Williams Bell
Terrence Alen
Tony Brown
Brilla Cherry
Suzette Ry
Lionell Hardy
Ronald E. Hairston
Brenda Mcgrew
John Mcgrew
Glenn Standifer
Charles Drake
Marvin Elkins
Archie Hamilton
Frederick W Penick
Marian A Penick
Dian Yvonne Laster
Idrece Elliot
Douglas H Penick
John Ellis
Thomas F Stone
Benjamin Williams
Inez Drake
Adrian Williams
Thedesa Christopher
Roman Bate
Kimberly Lowe
Regina Hamilton
Myrtle S Penick
Marjorie Carpenter
Tracy Carpenter
Cozette Perrin
Ki'yo Carter
Maria Crawford
Ruth E Cassius
Yzella Cassius
Edward Warmsley
Byron Warmsley
Valon Lyles
April Caldwell
Tiffany Pinder
Shaune Arnold
Fred Kaiser
Grover Johnson
Dione Bacon
James Bacon
Jackson Lawrence
Tom Pruitt
Stephanie Elliot
Michael Roby
Lew Brown
Dr. Henry Gordon
Mark Smith
Tony Brown
Henry Sanders
Crew
Johnny Ace
Johnny Ace
Clarence Armstrong
Dorothy Armstrong
Penny Barrett
Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett
Charles Burnett
Veda Campbell
Stanley Carr
L C Carter
Ruth E Cassius
Barry Cooper
Larry Cooper
Lewis Countee
Julie Dash
Danielle E Edwards
Omar Elaidi
Camelia Frieberg
Lisa M Garrett
Henry Gordon
Henry Gordon
Ronald E. Hairston
Barbara A Hale
Garnett Hargrave
Garnett Hargrave
Sean R Jackson
Arthur Jafa
Clifton Johnson
Brigitte Kramer
Kimberly E Lawrence
Arthur J Lopez
Edward M Osbourne
Christine Renee Penick
Thomas Penick
Thomas M Penick
Evamarie Presley
Paul Quan
Mark Rozett
Gaye Shannon-burnett
Gaye Shannon-burnett
Lynn Smith
Mark Smith
Sandra Y Stokes
Jaquetta M Vaughn
Earl C Williman
Videos
Movie Clip
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
My Brother's Wedding
Burnett's follow-up film, My Brother's Wedding was to suffer much the same public fate, though for different reasons. Commissioned by the German TV network Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen after it saw Killer of Sheep in Berlin and financed with help from a Guggenheim fellowship and funding from Channel 4 in England, Burnett wrote the original screenplay and began shooting the film in 1983, on location in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where he grew up.
Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) works the counter of his parents' dry cleaning business. He's not necessarily the black sheep of the Mundy family, but he has few prospects and far less ambition than his upwardly mobile brother Wendell (Dennis Kemper), a lawyer about to marry into a wealthy professional family. Pierce bristles at his mother's deference to Wendell's fiancée Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett) and has nothing but disdain for her snooty, socially pretentious family. Meanwhile he falls back into juvenile shenanigans with his boyhood buddy Soldier (Ronnie Bell), an ex-con who promises his mother to go straight but spends his days womanizing and killing time while Pierce enables his worst instincts.
Everett Silas anchors the film with his focused performance as the unfocused Pierce, but off-screen his behavior delayed the low-budget production, first when he essentially went on strike to demand a larger salary, and then when he dropped out of sight altogether (he turned up a few months later in New Orleans where he had become a preacher). The production dragged on for a year and Burnett was already late when he submitted his nearly two-hour rough cut to the German studio, which proceeded to show the unfinished cut in the New Directors/New Films festival in New York. Due to tepid reviews, My Brother's Wedding was never picked up for distribution and it languished for almost 25 years ("a catastrophic blow to the development of American culture," according to film critic Armond White) until Milestone (the studio that finally cleared the song rights for Killer of Sheep and distributed it to great acclaim in 2007) acquired the rights and enabled Burnett to finally finish editing the film. Trimmed by more than half an hour, the 82-minute "Director's Cut" was released in 2007.
Burnett described the film as a "tragic comedy" of a young man who "is not that emotionally mature. Philosophically, he looks at life in terms of the haves and have nots... He romanticizes the poor for the wrong reasons, and he hates the middle class for the wrong reasons. He sees things in black and white." Burnett's portrait of Pierce's world, however, is anything but black and white. He paints a world of complex family dynamics and social relations: dominant mothers, passive fathers, unwed pregnant young women and unfocused and irresponsible men. Crime and violence is part of the fabric of life (Burnett doesn't show it onscreen, but the echoes are felt in numerous scenes) and citizens and shop-owners keep guns for self-defense, yet neighbors are often treated like extended family. Pierce spends hours caring for aging neighborhood elders, taking responsibility for everyone but himself.
Like Killer of Sheep, the cast is largely nonprofessional and he uses them to capture the rhythm and color of the neighborhood. In other scenes, however, Burnett eschews that naturalism for a more satirical approach, caricaturing the bourgeois middle-class figures by exaggerating their affectations and pompous behavior. "They were the other extreme, with no soul, no morals or wisdom," Burnett explained in a 1988 interview. My Brother's Wedding, I think, was more moralistic than Killer of Sheep. It was more didactic." At the heart of the film, however, is a clear-eyed look at details and rhythms of everyday life in a culture too often seen on the screen only in crime thrillers and "blaxpoitation" films. "If a better film has been made about black life in the ghetto," writes Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "I haven't seen it."
Producers: Charles Burnett and Gaye-Shannon Burnett
Director: Charles Burnett
Screenplay: Charles Burnett
Cinematography: Charles Burnett
Film Editing: Thomas Penick
Cast: Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas), Mrs. Mundy (Jessie Holmes), Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett), Soldier Richards (Ronnie Bell), Wendell Mundy (Dennis Kemper), Sally Easter, Angela (Angela Burnett), Walker (Charles Bracy), Sonia's mother (Frances E. Nealy), Sonia's father (Sy Richardson).
C-82m.
by Sean Axmaker
My Brother's Wedding
Quotes
Trivia
Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States 1997
Released in United States February 2008
Released in United States July 1984
Released in United States May 1991
Released in United States October 2007
Released in United States Spring April 26, 1991
Re-released in United States September 14, 2007
Shown at Berlin International Film Festival (Forum - Special Screenings) February 7-17, 2008.
Shown at Cannes Film Festival (market) May 9-20, 1991.
Shown at Chicago International Film Festival (Black Perspectives, Special Presentation) October 4-17, 2007.
Restored print re-released in New York City September 14, 2007.
Shot in 1983.
Released in United States 1997 (Shown in New York City (Walter Reade Theater) as part of program "The Films of Charles Burnett: Witnessing for Everyday Heroes" January 31 - February 13, 1997.)
Released in United States February 2008 (Shown at Berlin International Film Festival (Forum - Special Screenings) February 7-17, 2008.)
Released in United States Spring April 26, 1991
Released in United States May 1991 (Shown at Cannes Film Festival (market) May 9-20, 1991.)
Released in United States July 1984 (Shown at FILMEX: Los Angeles International Film Exposition (American Independents) July 5-20, 1984.)
Re-released in United States September 14, 2007 (New York City)
Released in United States October 2007 (Shown at Chicago International Film Festival (Black Perspectives, Special Presentation) October 4-17, 2007.)