| Date | Fri 21 October 2022 |
|---|---|
| Time | 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM |
| Price | £6 |
Director: Nana Mensah (United States, 2021)
Certification: 15 | 1 h 18 min | Drama, Comedy | Language: English, Akan, Russian with English subtitles
Queen of Glory’ is the story of Sarah Obeng, the brilliant child of Ghanaian immigrants, who is quitting her Ivy League PhD program to follow her married lover to Ohio. When her mother dies suddenly, she bequeaths her daughter a Christian bookstore in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx where Sarah was raised. A follow-up on the classic immigrant’s tale, Queen of Glory provokes laughter and empathy, as its heroine is reborn through her inheritance.
Nana Mensah, in her statement as film director highlights “I chose to tell this story because both I, and Sarah Obeng, the main character, are tenacious. We both also exist in the hyphen between African-American. I grew up watching American movies that documented the Black American experience and I also grew up watching the movies of Nollywood, but the subject matters rarely crossed over… There seemed to be only two ways of being Black and I wasn’t quite either of them. But there was no time for existential crises, there was rent to figure out. So I graduated with a relatively useless Ivy League undergraduate degree and while my friends went into finance, I decided to pursue acting. And pursue I did. I spammed every casting director in New York, attended every cattle call, maxxed out my credit card to attend pay-for-play sessions with agents and managers who never followed up. I did everything around acting except act. But I would not be told ‘no.’ Sarah Obeng also hates a ‘no.’
★★★★ “The trials of a Ghanaian-American woman and her family never overpower the deft emotional savviness of this low-budget tale… This indie comedy from actor-turned-director Nana Mensah has been sweetly described as a love letter to immigrant daughters”– The Guardian
+ Short film Making of Tennis Balls at Rex Rubber
(Amateur film, Bradford-on-Avon, 1955, 6 min, silent)
This behind-the-scenes film shows each individual stage of tennis ball production, making for curiously hypnotic viewing. Whether it’s the stamping of rubber into hemispheres, or the cutting out of fabric to stick on the balls, these manufacturing processes are still basically used today, but perhaps the most interesting its recognise the workers who made this process possible and among them some members of our community!
This film was sponsored by the Rural Development Commission, a body which existed to spread economic opportunities across Britain. But tennis ball production is an industry which has now deserted Bradford-on-Avon (and almost all of Britain) in favour of overseas factories. The town’s association with rubber-working dated back to the Industrial Revolution, continuing in some form until the 1990s
With support of the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funds from the National Lottery in order to bring this project to more audiences across the UK.
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