Bless Their Little Hearts (L.A. Rebellion season)

Showroom Cinema is screening Bless Their Little Hearts on Sunday 18 October at 14:30, as part of their L.A. Rebellion season. The film is a 1984 drama, 80 minutes long, and it's one of the key titles in the season.

To get why it matters, it helps to know the movement it came from. The L.A. Rebellion started in the late 20th century when a wave of Black graduates came through the UCLA Film School. They were inspired by the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism and emerging African cinemas, and they used those influences to build an alternative to the Hollywood way of making American films — something that was highly political and intimately personal at the same time. Bless Their Little Hearts is counted as one of the movement's masterpieces: shot in 1984, it centres on a couple's confrontation captured in one continuous ten-minute take, which Richard Brody of The New Yorker called "one of the great domestic cataclysms of modern movies". Charles Burnett wrote and shot the film, and Kaycee Moore's performance as Andais Banks is still cited as a revelation.

The screening is part of Showroom's Black History Month programme, which also takes in films by Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis and Burnett himself. If you're interested in the L.A. Rebellion as a whole, this is a good place to start, and there's more to see around it.

Tickets are £12 on-peak, £10 concession, and £6 for 16-26 year olds with a free CINE26 membership. The film starts at 14:30 at Showroom Cinema, Paternoster Row, Sheffield City Centre, S1 2BX.