Join us to discuss the film American Fiction—one of this year’s Academy Award nominees for best picture.  AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson's hilarious directorial debut, which as Rotten Tomatoes says, “confronts our culture's obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes.  Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from "Black" entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish "Black" book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

Roger Ebert says: “The performances are great.  The pointed satire is so funny and says so much that has needed saying for years.”

Get a sneak peek with this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MbLCpYJPA

We invite you to watch the film, which is available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV.  Then join us on Monday, April 10 at 7 pm at the home of Louise Howell,  90 N. Shelmore Blvd.  A social is from 7-7:30 pm followed by a discussion led by our I’On’s own resident film scholar Fred White.

About Fred White and his passion for movies: “I've been a movie buff since I was eight or so and used to ride my bike to our neighborhood theater in Atlanta on Saturday, staying there from noon to 6PM, to watch a double feature, with a news reel, a couple of weekly "serials," and some other "shorts." As an adult, I was lucky enough to be able to teach film, as well as literature, for forty years in Baltimore at Goucher College. For example, for years I taught a course on the films of Stanley Kubrick and their literary sources. I team-taught an interdisciplinary honors course with a Japanese history professor called "Japan in Film," a survey of Japanese history from the 1930s to the 1990s using nothing but Japanese films as texts. And when I taught composition classes, I had the students view, discuss, and write about the films of the Coen Brothers.”