Fireside Chat: Charles Burnett

In this Fireside Chat, IDA’s Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon will draw Burnett into a wide-ranging conversation about his work, which includes a new documentary in production.

In recent years, Charles Burnett has started to get his due as a filmmaker deeply rooted in place and time, poetics and realism, and fierce independence. He grew up in Watts, and many of his later films were realist dramas that took place in the same South Los Angeles neighborhood. Burnett’s work has been hailed by film historians and even the Academy, which awarded him an honorary Oscar in 2017. He directed one of the most celebrated L.A. Rebellion films, Killer of Sheep (1978), in a career that agilely spans not only fiction—but also documentary.

Moving between genres isn’t easy. But Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), which was broadcast on Independent Lens, is an extraordinary rendition of the biographical documentary, agilely considering and criticizing how individuals become figureheads. As Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker, the film thrillingly “blends nonfiction, fiction, and metafiction—a narrative voice-over, dramatic reenactments, and on-camera interviews, including with Burnett himself—to create a deeply personal and analytical study of history.” In this Fireside Chat, IDA’s Executive Director Dominic Asmall Willsdon will draw Burnett into a wide-ranging conversation about his work, which includes a new documentary in production.