UPCOMING PROJECTS

New Releases - Coming Soon!

 

Dante James and DMD Films, LLC has plans to make another film based on the work of Charles W. Chesnutt.  He is currently seeking financing for a film based on Charles Chesnutt’s novel “The Marrow of Tradition.”  Published in 1901 the novel is a fictional retelling of the rise of the white supremacist movement, specifically as it aided the fomentation of what was originally referred to as the “race riots” that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. Some critics and historians argue over what would be a more proper term to define the incident.  Some favor the blunt and descriptive “massacre” while others prefer coup d'etat, in reference to the fact that the local black government was successfully overthrown by force.

 

Dante and DMD Films, LLC has launched a new venture with the African and African American Studies Program at Duke University, where he was recently named as adjunct faculty.  Working closely with AAAS faculty and Dr. J. Lorand Matory’s African and African American Research Institute Dante will develop faculty scholarship, i.e. books, papers research into film production proposals. The proposals for both narrative and documentary film projects will be submitted to various funding entities.

 

In July 2010 Dante will serve as a guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town in Cape Town, South Africa. Additionally he will conduct research for a potential film project. Specific his research will explore the influence of black operated community and/or commercial radio in the Cape Town area. Community radio in South Africa began in 1994, when the country’s broadcasting authority began the continuing process of assisting and granting license applications for diverse groups such as rural women’s cooperatives, Afrikaner communities and township communities.

 

During the apartheid era, broadcasting was firmly in the grip of the state-run South African Broadcasting Authority.  With democracy, however contrasted with the apartheid era came the deregulation and liberalization of broadcasting, and the number of stations operating outside of the authority’s control proliferated.

 

This research will be the first phase of producing a documentary film tentatively titled “Free to Speak”