BRIC Announces Rare Screening of AMANDLA! A REVOLUTION IN FOUR PART HARMONY at Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Festival, 7/25

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, BRIC is pleased to present a screening of Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony(2002) at the Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Festival, which is presented by Squarespace, on July 25. The screening is part of the Festival's Music & Movies series, which pairs live music with iconic films projected onto the Festival's enormous screen - the largest outdoor screen in New York City. South African musician Neo Muyanga will kick off the event at 7:30 P.M with a live performance of his score to William Kentridge's short film Second-hand Reading (2013). The evening is free to the public (with a suggested $3 contribution at the gate).

"There has probably never been a revolution that did not use songs to give voice to its aspirations or rally the morale of its adherents" remarks the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim in Amandla!. Called "restless and moving" by The New York Times, the film charts the key role music played in the streets, on records, in prison and in exile during South Africa's struggle to free itself from Apartheid. Amandla! takes its name from the Zulu and Xhosa word for "power." Lee Hirsch, who directed and co-produced the film, also produced the soundtrack, a collection of South African "freedom songs." The album was executive produced by Dave Matthews and released on his label ATO Records.

Neo Muyanga (Composer, Librettist, Musician), born in Soweto, South Africa, grew up surrounded by myth and song. He studied Italian madrigal tradition with choral maestro Piero Poclen at Collegio del Mondo Unito in Trieste, Italy. In 1996, he co-founded the acoustic pop duo BLK Sonshine with Masauko Chipembere. The two continue to tour extensively throughout Africa and the world. Muyanga draws inspiration from traditional Sesotho and Zulu music of South Africa, which he fuses with the melismatic style of Ethiopia, Jazz and western classical music.

The 58-year-old South African artist and filmmaker William Kentridge began his career as an actor and went on to work as a theatre director in Johannesburg, before developing all manner of unusual artistic styles, including a painterly style of filmmaking that combines stop-motion animation with continual redrawing and erasure, bringing a canvas to life. His work has been performed, screened and exhibited in major cultural institutions around the world. Second-hand Reading is a 'flip book' film constructed from hundreds of framed blocks of drawings, self-portrait sequences of the artist, texts, geometric blocks of color, and calligraphic renderings.