Next week on Valentine’s Day NCLAC will present a special movie night at the Dixie with a documentary titled Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story. Tickets for the evening are available at the door and are very affordable. Adult tickets are $5, students $3, and NCLAC members may attend free! We will also have popcorn for $1.
Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story is a documentary portrait of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African-American string band from Raleigh, North Carolina, and their mentor, the late fiddler Joe Thompson. The film captures how three musicians from the hip-hop generation embraced a 19th Century genre and took it to new heights, winning a Grammy in 2010. The story of the band’s meteoric rise, from busking on the street to playing major festivals is punctuated and informed by the history of the banjo’s origins in Africa, and the untold story of how blacks and whites collaborated to create the earliest forms of American popular music.
This is the first installment of NCLAC’s spring season of the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers. We will show three movies this spring: Don’t Get Trouble next week, Bathtubs Over Broadway in March, and This is Home in April. In addition to receiving films of the highest quality, Southern Circuit also provides our audience access to the filmmakers who create the films. John Whitehead will be here with us next week for an exclusive Q&A after his film Don't Get Trouble in Your Mind. Whitehead, a musician as well as a filmmaker, collected material for this film over thirteen years. “Filming the Drops playing in Joe Thompson’s living room or backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, these were once-in-a-lifetime experiences that more than compensate for the effort of getting the film made,” Whitehead said in a recent interview. “I didn’t intend to capture a longitudinal record of a band from inception to break-up, but working slowly and on a small budget, that’s how the story evolved.”
Mr. Whitehead’s work has earned eight regional Emmy Awards, an HBO Films Producer Award, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award, and the Gold Plaque from The Chicago Film Festival. We are so grateful to our film sponsors for next week: Cathi Cox-Boniol, Peter Jones, Hampton Inn by Hilton of Ruston, and First National Bank. Community support for this series has been wonderful, and we would love for our readers to join us Thursday at 7pm at the Dixie for this entertaining and insightful opportunity. The Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers is a program of South Arts, a nonprofit regional arts organization based in Atlanta that focuses on advancing Southern vitality through the arts. Southern Circuit screenings are funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment of the Arts.