Ava DuVernay To Exec Produce Doc Short 'A Concerto Is A Conversation’
The new short subject documentary A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION tells the story of virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer Kris Bowers as he tracks his family’s lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker and entrepreneur Ben Proudfoot and Emmy-winning composer Kris Bowers (“Green Book”, “When They See Us,” “Bridgerton”), and executive produced by Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay, A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION will have its festival debut at the all-virtual 2021 Sundance Film Festival this week starting on Thursday, January 28th at 7:00AM PST as part of Documentary Shorts Program 2. The film is currently streaming at nytimes.com. The film was produced by Proudfoot’s Los Feliz based Breakwater Studios.
DuVernay and Bowers discuss the film in a pre-recorded conversation. “I was blown away,” DuVernay tells Bowers about her response to his intimate film, which she also called “a balm for these times.” DuVernay says the film captured “an intimacy within the sphere of Black masculinity that is so rare to see, that crosses the generational divide in a way that is rarely seen” and, later, that “it feels like I’m watching an exchange within my own family. I feel like Black people who have borne witness and participated in that exchange, it will feel beautifully familiar. And for folks who feel like that exchange is foreign or does not exist, it will be instructive. But more than anything, it is a record of a great man.”
Kris Bowers is one of Hollywood’s rising young composers. At 29, he scored the Oscar-winning film “Green Book” (2018), and this year he premiered a new violin concerto, “For a Younger Self,” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Bowers also scored DuVernay’s Emmy-winning limited series “When They See Us.” For all that success, though, he says that as a Black composer, “I’ve been wondering whether or not I’m supposed to be in the spaces that I’m in.”
In the 13-minute film A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION, Bowers traces the process of breaking into new spaces through generations of sacrifice that came before him, focusing on the story of his grandfather Horace Bowers.
As a young man, he left his home in the Jim Crow South, eventually ending up in Los Angeles. Encountering discrimination at every turn, he and his wife, Alice, nevertheless made a life as business owners. Today, their legacy lives on through their family and community in South Los Angeles, where a stretch of Central Avenue was recently designated Bowers Retail Square — in case any question remained about whether it’s a place they belong.
Horace Bowers tells his grandson: “Never think that you’re not supposed to be there.”