On Criterion, I watched the 1994 drama Alma's Rainbow, written and directed by Ayoka Chenzira, centered on women in a Black family in Brooklyn, exploring themes of sisterhood and motherhood, set in a spacious Brooklyn brownstone home, and having this old New York City feel to it that I really appreciated. The film focuses on teenager Rainbow Gold (Victoria Gabrielle Platt), who hides Day-Glo shorts under her Catholic school uniform, and practices hip-hop dancing with her friends in the park, and binds her breasts, and doesn't want to be seen as either a tomboy or a girly girl, but embracing both sides of her, as she has romantic fantasies about Miles (Isaiah Washington). Her mother, Alma (Kim Weston-Moran) is more conservative and straight-laced, telling her daughter to stay away from boys, and runs a beauty salon out of their home. The family dynamic gets shaken up more when Alma's sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby) comes back after living in Paris for ten years, being flighty and dramatic and romanticizing Josephine Baker to her niece Rainbow, to which Alma flatly repeats about Baker, "Died broke."
The film features a beautiful jazz score by Jean-Paul Bourelly, with Me'Shell Ndegeocello on bass (simply credited in the film as "Meshell"), and a rich cinematography captured by Ronald K. Gray, who also shot Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground in 1982. This is a story about women in a family bonding with each other, and sharing intergenerational history, as there are black and white flashbacks to Alma as a child with her own mother, and her mother's ashes kept in an urn in the living room.
On Letterboxd, theironcupcake wrote a stunning review that captures the film much more eloquently and deeply than I can, and I share a passage from their review: "Ultimately this is the story of a family realizing the strength of its bonds, whether in the comforts of holding each other while asleep in bed, Alma and Ruby (the latter dressed in a floor-length, off-the-shoulder canary yellow gown with matching boa) healing some of their longstanding rift by wrestling each other to the floor (laughing all the while), Ruby teaching Rainbow how to walk in such a way as to project confidence, both Alma and Rainbow individually (re)discovering the desire to be touched and for feelings reciprocated in acts of love (though Rainbow is still a little too young for much more than dreams; she has a few of a boy named Miles, played by Isaiah Washington), and Rainbow cutting her hair into a flapper bob in homage to her aunt's affection for Josephine Baker. As Ruby says, the reality of life is that it is not "always great books and heartfelt jazz; I don't care what they say. But I keep on keepin' on because that's what I do best." Survival, that's the ticket. Any way you can do it, get it done, but it's definitely more fun if you and your loved ones stick together."
Ayoka Chenzira is a director, animator, experimental filmmaker, and storyteller. She grew up in North Philadelphia, in the same building where her mother owned a beauty salon. Her mother made reimagined designer clothing, and encouraged Ayoka to follow her artistic passions, and she got into filmmaking at 17, becoming one of the first African-Americans to be a film educator in higher education. In the ending credits for Alma's Rainbow, she thanks fellow Black female filmmakers like Julie Dash, Ada Griffin, and Mabel Haddock, as well as the late Kathleen Collins and the late screenwriter Waldo Salt.
Her film is a tribute to Black women family and finding connections with each other. In one scene, Rainbow gets her period for the first time, and the women alternate sitting by her side as she lays in bed with a rubber hot water bottle on her stomach to relieve cramps, and one cuts up ginger to make tea for her. It's an example of the shared womanhood of their family to show support and pass down stories as she goes through this rite of passage. It's a lovely and beautiful film, and I'm glad I checked it out.
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