8:10 p.m.	My Brother’s Wedding Charles Burnett (U.S., 1983)

“Was lost, but now, I’m found”: Opening with a man singing “Amazing Grace” at a church service in Watts, My Brother’s Wedding sets up an array of ironies. Thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy is emphatically not found, resentful of familiar roles but unable to create new ones, stuck in a love-hate relationship with his family and his community. Pierce rejects the upward mobility represented by his buppie brother Wendell and Wendell’s fiancée Sonia—Sonia asks, “Is Pierce retarded?” “No, just ghettoized”—but the alternate path laid out by his best friend only leads to prison or worse. So here Pierce is, working at the family dry-cleaning business, which Burnett uses as a setting for revealing encounters with a range of wonderful supporting characters. Made on a tiny budget and never given a proper theatrical release, the film was reedited by Burnett in 2007 to bring it closer to his original intentions. This is a moving comedy about getting nowhere, an eloquently ambivalent portrayal of the ties that bind.

—Juliet Clark

• Written, Photographed by Burnett. With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell. (82 mins)

Preceded by short:
Quiet as Kept (Charles Burnett, U.S., 2007). A film about a family’s everyday struggles in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (5 mins)

• (Total running time: 87 mins, Color, DigiBeta, From Milestone)