Three years after his tragic death, acclaimed actor Michael K. Williams receives a posthumous birthday tribute.

On Friday, November 22, which might have been Williams’ 58th birthday, his final appearance in the animated short film “Brown Dog” Written by Willis Earl Beal and co-directed by award-winning documentarian Nadia Hallgren (director of Michelle Obama’s Emmy-nominated documentary “Becoming”) and inventive director Jamie-James Medina (“The xx,” FKA twigs, “Sampha”). “Boardwalk Empire” castmate Steve Buscemi appears in a supporting role and can be an executive producer on the project in association with WeTransfer, which commissioned the project. Actor and director Chiwetel Ejiofor and Idris Elba, Williams’ co-star on “The Wire,” recently joined the executive producing team.

“When I was asked to serve as executive producer on ‘The Brown Dog,’ “I felt like I had a natural, emotional reference to Michael K. Williams, my dear friend and collaborator on ‘The Wire,'” Elba said in a statement. “Michael had such a unique gift of bringing soul, depth and honesty to every role he played, and it is an honor to continue his legacy in this film. “The Brown Dog” is not just a story about survival and friendship; is a tribute to Michael’s spirit, his artistry and the lasting impact he had on all of us. I am proud to help bring this beautiful, touching story to life and ensure Michael’s voice is heard even after his death.”

The film’s synopsis reads:

“Rendered in a palette of saturated yellows and dark blacks, it is Mr. Williams’ unforgettable rhythm that drives ‘The Brown Dog.’ He voices the main character of “NOBODY”, the night guard of an exclusive apartment complex, whose sense of isolation causes an existential crisis. Cold and lonely, NOBODY sets out in search of the mysterious brown dog, taking us on a fascinating journey into a confused mind at work. The film itself is a celebration of Mr. Williams and the profound truth he brought to each character in which he appeared – only his voice could speak so quietly but profoundly to the experiences of those living on the margins of the American Dream.”

Just in time for the holidays, fans can now watch “The Brown Dog.” WeTransfer YouTube Channeland revel in the incredible talent of Michael K. Williams in one in every of his final roles. As Chiwetel Ejiofor said in a press release: “Michael K. Williams understood that bringing truth to a character is real work. He was such a talented actor. The same depth of his spirit can be seen on screen in “The Brown Dog.” Michael NEVER speaks to our times. It conveys a deep sense of isolation and frustration with the world, but connects to the true human need for connection. You will hear Michael as soon as you hear ANYONE’S voice. “The Brown Dog” is an attractive tribute to Michael’s talent and I’m thrilled to be a part of the team that continues his legacy.

More details about “The Brown Dog” might be found at: movie website.

NEW YORK (AP) – When photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at age 49 of pancreatic cancer in a Manhattan hospital, his death went unrecorded.

Cole, one of the essential chroniclers Apartheid-era South Africa, By then he was mostly forgotten and destitute. Banned in his home country following the publication of his pioneering book on photography “House of slavery”, Cole emigrated to the United States in 1966. However, his life in exile steadily was periodic homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times was attached to the list of death notices.

But in Raoul Peck’s latest film, Cole experiences a vivid and moving resurrection “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” told in Cole’s own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which hits theaters on Friday, is crammed with images of Cole, lots of which have never been seen publicly before.

Just like within the Oscar-nominated documentary about James Baldwin “I’m Not Your Negro” Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit along with his hero. The book “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is drawn from Cole’s writings. Through words and images, Peck brings Cole’s tragic story to life, reopening the lens through which Cole viewed injustice and humanity so acutely.

“Film is a political tool for me,” Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. “My job is to succeed in as wide an audience as possible and try to present them something that helps them understand where they’re, what they do and what role they play. It’s about my fight today. “I’m not interested in the past.”

“Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is a movie crammed with meanings beyond Cole’s work. It asks questions not only concerning the societies Cole documented, but in addition about how he was treated as an artist, drawing uncomfortable parallels between apartheid and post-Jim Crow America. In the United States, Cole received a Ford Foundation grant to document black life in rural and urban areas, but he had difficulty finding skilled support. Some editors felt that his paintings lacked “expression”.

In 2017, over 60,000 35mm negatives of Cole were discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm, Sweden. Much of this material, including hundreds of photos Cole took within the US, is believed to have been lost. It was difficult to search out answers as to how they got there and why they’d not been known about them before. “Lost and Found” depicts the struggle of Cole’s estate to amass the gathering. Only on the eve of the film’s premiere on the Cannes Film Festival in May did the bank finally announce the transfer of a lot of the materials to the estate.

These photos reveal that the artist created rather more than simply indelible images of life under apartheid. Cole’s early photographs, published in 1967, provided the West with one of the illustrative and damning portraits of apartheid, including a widely reproduced photograph of a middle-aged woman sitting on a park bench bearing the words “Unique in Europe.” But he was an equally astute and sensitive observer of segregation and the multicultural joys of American life.

“It’s a matter of survival,” says Stanfield as Cole. “Steal every moment.”

For Peck, the subject material of “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found” is deeply personal. The 71-year-old filmmaker, former Haitian Minister of Culture, also spent most of his artistic life outside his home country, in Berlin, Paris and New York. He dedicates the film to “those who died in exile.”

“When I say this, I mean most of my friends,” he says. “I recognize all of the steps. When you are taking a contact sheet, I see myself.

Over some forty years, Peck has made a few of his most urgent movies, each fiction (including 2000’s “Lumumba,” concerning the exiled Congolese leader) and nonfiction (including last 12 months’s “The Way of the Silver Dollar”). But he has rarely didn’t employ narrative and documentary elements in movies that tackle their very own shape – movies less fascinated by genre differences than within the seek for unexplored truths.

This makes Peck an increasingly unique figure in a documentary world that’s increasingly dominated by shinier, less insightful movies intended for streaming platforms.

“It’s getting worse. There’s less money, so young people are desperate and accepting things that my generation would never accept,” Peck says. “The whole industry has changed. I knew a different world and I realize it’s not the same one anymore.”

Peck is currently editing a documentary about George Orwell. Like Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, it’ll be told entirely in Orwell’s words. In the times after the US election, Peck worked on an update to a segment of the film that involved President-elect Donald Trump. Peck was amazed by Orwell’s foresight on so many topical issues – disinformation, artificial intelligence, social media and the refugee crisis.

“He was a truly amazing critic of history and the way history is told,” Peck says. “I didn’t realize before I got into it how smart he was about what’s going on today.”

“For me,” he adds, “a film has value if it speaks to us today.”

I do not know exactly when it happened, but Keke Palmer became certainly one of African Americans’ favorite people. Maybe it was while playing lie detector segment for Vanity Fair she, like lots of us, couldn’t recognize Dick Cheney in a photograph and gave us certainly one of the best sound bites of all time. Or possibly that is once we all realized how human she was as she handled a family situation that was made public. The possibilities are countless because I feel like Keke Palmer has been in my life without end, despite the fact that I’m 14 years older than her. I used to be actually years old today after I discovered that as of this writing she is just 31 – and I even have never felt older.

Recently beloved artist he went on, “Club Shay Shay” to speak about her life, profession and every little thing else under the sun, likely to promote her just-released book “Master of Me: The Secret to Controlling Your Narrative.” During a conversation about dating (which Keke was mainly flexing, roughly), she mentioned that she became a millionaire at the age of 12 and that got me considering: what was she doing at age 12 that made her a millionaire? The second query, in fact, is: what did I do at the age of 12 that made me a millionaire? The answer definitely involved riding the bike out of the garage and seeing if I could land it without breaking the bike or any bones.

NO. At age 12, I used to be introducing my parents to latest and revolutionary ways to take care of disappointment.

Anyway, my curiosity about how she managed to turn out to be a millionaire at the age of 12 (which would have been 2005) made me check her IMDB credits and yes, it coincided along with her breakout role as Akeelah Anderson within the film , “Akeelah and the Bee”, a movie I still love to this present day. I watch it every time it’s on and have even decided to dedicate an episode to the podcast “Dear Culture” for the movie. I actually attribute to Keke Palmer that I do know the word “prestidigitation” (though I do not know what it means), but most significantly, I do know the word “pulchritude”, which comes from Latin and means “Beautiful” which means beautiful.

I am unable to say this strongly enough: if it weren’t for this movie, I might never have learned this word, and if Keke Palmer made a million dollars for me to learn this word, she was underpaid. The variety of times I threw the word “pulchritude” at people, it should be illegal. I do not even use the word “beautiful” anymore; I only refer to my wife as “pulchritudinous”. Because she is. And there’s just one person I can thank for that: Akeelah Anderson. And Akeelah Anderson is Keke Palmer.

Thank you Keke Palmer for helping me expand my horizons and vocabulary. And for ensuring I all the time and without end know how to spell “pulchritude.”