Killer of Sheep at Brooks Sunday
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- A scene from Killer of Sheep
A portrait of daily life in working-class-when-there's-work Watts, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep won the Critics' Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1981 and was one of the first 50 films chosen for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1990. But it's has rarely been shown.
Today, at the Brooks screens Killer of Sheep at 2 p.m.
Burnett was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1944, but he was raised in a neighborhood of other black Southern transplants in Los Angeles. He shot Killer of Sheep on weekends around his parents' Watts home on a $10,000 budget with a cast almost entirely composed of non-actors. As an example of American independent cinema in its homemade origins, it may be rivaled only by the likes of Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, John Cassavetes' Shadows, and David Lynch's Eraserhead.
Read the entire Flyer review here.
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