It’s a road movie turned upside down: Indian, black and Latino muralists embark on a cross-country odyssey to heal their racial rage.
It’s ultra low budget: It cost $210,000 to make — 1,000 times less than “Titanic.”
It’s confusing: The plot snakes around and around, veering off into disturbing, abstractly poetic reveries.
Critics don’t dig it. The white man doesn’t save the day. Indeed, “Follow Me Home” is not a film upon which blockbuster dreams are made.
Mainstream film folks just couldn’t find the handle on this flick.
“Hollywood was right when it said, “We don’t know how to market this film,’ ” says New Millenia Films distributor Henri Norris. “Is it black? Is it Native American? Is it Latino? Is it art house?”
And yet, despite its perceived liabilities, there is something about “Follow Me Home” that grabs the gut, sending those who encounter it–primarily people of color–on a mission to spread its gospel as the film makes it way from city to city without benefit of advertising, and audiences stick around long after the credits roll for spirited Q&A with the filmmakers.
The film opened in Chicago on Feb. 27 for an open-ended run at Inner City Entertainment’s Chatham 14/Cineplex Odeon Theatre, 210 W. 87th St.
Alfre Woodard, a three-time Emmy Award-winning actress, was so moved by the script that she told its first-time director, a construction worker/activist/Poly Sci major who learned his craft reading how-to books, that she’d gladly work for free. Norris, a San Francisco civil rights attorney, mortgaged her house to finance the film’s distribution. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker championed “Follow Me Home” in an essay from her book, “Whatever We Love Can Be Saved.”
“I did `Follow Me Home’ because when I picked up the script, 10 pages into it, it was appealing to so many parts of myself, artistically, politically, spiritually, that I couldn’t stay out of it,” Woodard says. “As I read, I kept praying that nothing would happen where I would have to say, `No, I can’t be in it.’ But that didn’t happen. It was a gift.”
Except that none of the Hollywood powers-that-be said, “Let’s make a deal.” And without a distribution arrangement an independent movie is headed straight for video–if it’s lucky.
It didn’t matter that “Follow Me Home” appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and won the Best Feature Film Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Best Screenplay and Best Director awards at the American Indian Film Festival. Such accolades don’t guarantee success; many indie films never see the light of day after hitting the festival film circuit.
It didn’t help that critics hated the film. The Chicago Tribune dismissed “Follow Me Home” as one of the Sundance “stiffs.”
So no one would touch “Follow Me Home”–unless, that is, the filmmakers were willing to perform some major surgery on it, say, trim back the dream sequences to make it more palatable for “mainstream” audiences.
The filmmakers weren’t.
“We thought we were destined for distribution. We’d had such a profound embrace from the minority audience,” recalls “Follow Me Home” writer/director Peter Bratt, a 35-year-old of Peruvian Indian descent who co-produced the film with his brother, actor Benjamin Bratt of NBC-TV’s “Law & Order.”
Benjamin Bratt also stars in “Follow Me Home” as Abel, a Chicano artist with a serious attitude problem.
“We were shellshocked when the film didn’t get picked up. But we were determined to have the film seen,” Bratt continues. “Like Malcolm X says, `By any means necessary.’ It became this coalition of Native American, African and Latino people working together to get the film out there.”
Which is where Henri Norris hooked up with the Bratt brothers. An attorney, Norris helped win large cash settlements for women in the Dalkon Shield class action suit and had decided to spend her earnings producing her first love, film. She saw “Follow Me Home” and fell head over heels.
So she approached the Bratt brothers with her plan to literally taking the show on the road, introducing it to one or two theaters in one city at a time, slowly building an audience through a labor-intensive, grass-roots effort. A crucial component of this technique is the discussion following the film. Using this method, coupled with a potent word of mouth, “Sankofa,” an underground slave rebellion film written and directed by Howard University professor Haile Gerima, ultimately raked in nearly $3 million in box office receipts without benefit of advertising.
Peter Bratt wasn’t convinced. But he was committed to getting “Follow Me Home” out there by any means necessary.
“If you really believe in something, you have to see it through,” Bratt says.
So New Millennia Films was formed. Norris became the first African-American woman to own a film distribution company. And Peter Bratt became a director with a film in theatrical release. In February of last year they started their campaign, crossing the country with their film and their message.
Folks responded. Some laughed. Others wept. Still others raged.
In San Antonio, a woman stormed out of the theater, grabbing Bratt in the lobby to give him a piece of her mind: How could he make this film? How could he? Together, the two went back into the theater, watching the remainder of the film side by side. By the time the lights came up, they were sobbing in each others’ arms.
The premise of “Follow Me Home” is simple: Two Latino cousins, Tudee, (Jesse Borrego of “Mi Vida Loca”) a “college boy” with plans to hit it big on the art scene, and Abel, a bigoted ex-con, join their friends Kaz (Calvin Levels), an African-American Buddhist, and Freddy (Steve Reevis), a Native American recovering alcoholic, on a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to the nation’s capital.
Their mission: to paint the White House, or as Tudee says, “Putting our colors and our images on the walls of La Casa Blanca.”
Along the way, they are joined by Evey (Alfre Woodard), an enigmatic black woman with a secret, as they encounter a slew of racist white men dressed up in cavalry uniforms and hellbent on showing the ragtag group of artists who’s boss.
The ensuing confrontation is interspersed with archival footage depicting indigenous people, Indians and Africans, and their transformation during the colonizing of the New World. Stripped of their cultures, they are shown, heads bowed, making the sign of the cross, or dashing through Southern streets, running from water hoses turned on them. Filtered through these images are black and white dream sequences where Tudee is seemingly held in the thrall of a nameless, symbolic white man in a powdered white wig.
Such images put many white viewers on the defensive, and leave others of all races scratching their heads.
“There are deep psychological scars that need to be talked about and unburied,” Bratt says. “In this dialogue on race, no one talks about white privilege and what that means. But as people of color, we live with it every day.”
– – –
It’s Tuesday night on the South Side, and a small but interested audience is trying to make sense of the images with which they’ve just been confronted. Bratt has returned to San Francisco, but Norris has stayed on, doggedly attending the Q&A sessions following the four daily screenings of the film.
“It bothers me that the black female plays a dominant role and the black man has nothing to say; he’s soft,” says a sixtyish black man. “I found that insulting. Is the film trying to say that all males of color find the role of black males to be subservient?”
“I would not be distributing a film that showed black men to be subservient,” Norris told him. “Peter based that character on a friend of his who is a black vegetarian Buddhist. He wanted to show another side of blackness.”
“But most black men in this country aren’t Buddhist, they’re Christian,” the man protests.
“We shouldn’t project our feelings onto this film,” murmured a middle-aged woman as the debate heats up.
“I’m going to tell my friends about this movie,” a young black woman from the back of the theater pipes up. “They’ll tell their friends and they’ll tell their friends. Pretty soon, it’ll blow up. We look to other people to market us. But we’re the best marketing tool that we have.”
