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 Captivating
documentary traces the journey of the anti-lynching song Strange
Fruit, written by a Bronx schoolteacher, popularized by Billie
Holliday (pictured), and immortalized by the civil-rights struggle.
Compactly tells the tale of the song's creator while also following
his creation's own unique history. Directed by Joel Katz. (See box.)
(57 mins.; NR) Paired with One Girl Against the Mafia, about
a Sicilian girl who dared to testify against la Cosa Nostra. (56
mins.; NR) — BILGE EBIRI
Opens November 6
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
Spotlight: Diretor Joel Katz
"It still amazes me how twelve lines can change the world," says
Joel Katz, the director of Strange Fruit, a documentary about the
thirties anti-lynching protest song. Written by Abel Meeropol, the
somber elegy was claimed as her own by Billie Holiday, who spread
its chilling vision with the force of a gospel anthem. Through interviews
and archives, Katz touches on the great stories of twentieth-century
America: race and religion, McCarthyism, jazz, and New York from
Greenwich Village to Harlem. "If you focus on one tiny object and
keep peeling away layers, you can wind up discovering an entire
world," the New Jersey City University professor says. Katz also
found that his own life resonated with that of Meeropol, a Jewish
schoolteacher from the Bronx: "My father taught at Howard for twenty
years and started out very idealistic, but eventually, as a white
Jewish man from Brooklyn, he became bitter. The song's story is
a much more hopeful model than my own for black-Jewish relations."
The song's history, which was also told in last year's unrelated
novel by David Margolick, takes unexpected turns: Meeropol, for
example, adopted the two sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the
American Communists executed in 1953. "The story reads like a script,"
Katz says. "I set out to explore the potential for art to activate
social change and wound up discovering this new world, which came
from the Bronx."
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