`Down In The Delta' - feature film debut by poet Maya Angelou - Brief Article

In her feature-length movie debut as a director, Maya Angelou brings the story of human truths to life

Before crime battered communities, before drugs ravaged lives, the North was considered a promised land, a place where Blacks could journey for hope of better days. Today, some folks are heading back home to the South for the same reasons. Down in the Delta, a film directed by Maya Angelou and starring Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes, brings that reality to the screen.

The moving story peers into the lives of the Sinclairs, a Chicago family endangered by alcoholism and urban blight. The family matriarch has a choice; she can surrender her family to the streets or pawn the family heirloom--an antique silver candelabra called "Nathan"--and send her daughter and two grandchildren to stay with family in Mississippi for the summer. She chooses family above material things. "What's the point of saving `Nathan' for the next generation, when the next generation won't be there?" asks Rosa Lynn, a character played by Mary Alice.

The story unfolds as her troubled daughter takes on the challenge of saving the family and herself by earning the money to reclaim "Nathan" before it's sold. In the process, she sheds her wild ways and learns about tradition, responsibility and understanding.

"It's universal because there are people like that in every family," says Woodard, who plays Loretta, the mother who threatens to destroy the family with her drinking. "Cousin Frank might have just shot somebody last week, but he's coming to dinner if he's out on bail and he's gonna sit right there at your mother's linen tablecloth and eat off the china along with your uncle who's a minister and your auntie who has a Stanford degree ... Family forces us to realize we are all human beings and have to sit down at the table together"

Along with Woodard and Snipes, the cast boasts veteran actors including Mary Alice, Al Freeman Jr., Loretta Devine and Esther Rolle in one of her last film roles before her death. The movie also stands out as the feature-film directing debut of renaissance poet/actress/icon Angelou.

When producer Reuben Cannon began searching for someone who could transform the vitality of Down in the Delta from the page to the screen, Angelou was the one he wanted. Intent on convincing her to accept the project, he traveled with his production team to her Winston-Salem, N. C., home. She read the script and quickly accepted.

"In all of my work, I try to tell the human truth--what it is like to be a human ... what makes us stumble and tumble and fall and somehow miraculously rise and go on from darkness into light," says Angelou. "This is what drew me to Down in the Delta. It is a story of these very kind of human truths, a story to remind us that, as human beings, we are more alike than different."

Though Down in the Delta marks her first time as a movie director, Angelou has been behind the scenes before. Along with directing PBS projects and full-length plays, her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a Black woman to be produced.

Colleagues praise Angelou for her energy, sense of purpose and skill at motivating the cast. Actors say she blends a historian's insight with a poet's vision. "Maya will stop you in the middle of the most tedious, most mundane days and make you realize that all your moments are actually historic," says Woodard, who co-starred with Angelou and Rolle in the film How to Make an American Quilt. "She made everybody focus on what our task is, technically in the scene but also on the historical time line. She was very wonderful in weaving that atmosphere to produce the kind of picture that she did."

Already, the film has won critical reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival and the Urbanworld International Film Festival, billed by some as the Black counterpart to the renowned Sundance Festival. Insiders say it's up to the Black community whether the film becomes a success.

"The times that we give audiences [movies that show] who they are, they've got to come and support them," says Woodard, "because it takes gallons of blood to get these simple things to the screen. They've got to come right away or they may never see themselves on screen. They will just see this fantasy about themselves."

When Woodard viewed the finished movie, the actress says she had a sudden urge to call home. She saw her father in the strong figure of Uncle Earl. She thought about her siblings, her mother, the family members she jokingly calls "crazy" and those who owe her money. It's that commonality that makes Down in the Delta special. Everyone can look at the screen and find something from their own life, someone they love.

"I hope what people take away from this is that everybody is somebody's family," says the three-time Emmy Award-winning actress. "When you look at another human being, you're looking at somebody's cousin, daughter, brother. If people passed Loretta on the streets of Chicago, they would draw all kinds of assumptions about her. But we get to do a movie about her so they can see how magnificent she is."

COPYRIGHT 1999 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group