Bless Their Little Hearts

In the 1970s, a group of young African and African American filmmakers in the UCLA film program launched the L.A. Rebellion, which drew inspiration from Italian Neo-Realism and focused on intimate stories of the Black experience. "Bless Their Little Hearts," the feature debut of Billy Woodbury, is a portrait of a family in 1980s South Central Los Angeles. Directed from a script written by Charles Burnett (the most prominent of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers), it follows the day to day lives of Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman), an unemployed husband and father looking for steady employment and picking up day work to get by, and Andais (Kaycee Moore), his overworked wife trying to balance work with raising their three young children. Their relationship unravels as Charlie starts an affair and the film builds to a powerful moment where Andais lets her frustrations out in a torrent. But the film is driven less by plot than by documentary-like observation of their day-to-day experiences, with dramatic scenes interspersed with silent interludes of quiet moments of rest or play, lovely grace notes in a film steeped in the struggles of surviving and retaining one's dignity in the face of poverty and unemployment. The film was shot in black and white on the streets of Watts and the cast improvised much of the dialogue, giving the film both a stark realism and a sometimes awkward quality. It's a landmark of American Independent filmmaking and was added to the National Film Registry in 2013. The film debuts on DVD and Blu-ray in a newly-restored edition with commentary, Woodbury's 1980 short film "The Pocketbook," and an interview with Woodbury discussing his collaboration with Burnett among the supplements. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)