American Fiction

Date: 01/10/2024 Times: 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

This is the third film in a row we are showing that the Guardian deems one of the best of the year. It was nominated in six categories for an Oscar: Best Film of the year, Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominations for Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K Brown and Best Music and Cord Jefferson won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He also won a BAFTA in the same category. The screenplay is based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure.

It is also Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut and confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from ‘Black’ entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish ‘Black’ book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain. The story works on two levels, first as a prickly critique of the pressures facing Black creatives but equally satisfying is its depiction of the abrasive, complicated dynamics in a high-achieving family. Tracee Ellis Ross, in the picture all too briefly, is terrific as Thelonious’s doctor sister; her scenes opposite Wright have a bracingly sharp-edged heart and humour.

Venue: William Loveless Hall