I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit. — Grace Lee Boggs

We are pleased to present American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, starting Friday, April 4.

What does it mean to be an American revolutionary today? Grace Lee Boggs is a 98-year-old Chinese American woman in Detroit whose vision of revolution will surprise you. A writer, activist, and philosopher rooted for more than 70 years in the African American movement, she has devoted her life to an evolving revolution that encompasses the contradictions of America’s past and its potentially radical future.

This documentary plunges us into Boggs’s lifetime of vital thinking and action, traversing the major U.S. social movements of the last century; from labor to civil rights, to Black Power, feminism, the Asian American and environmental justice movements and beyond. Boggs’s constantly evolving strategy—her willingness to re-evaluate and change tactics in relation to the world shifting around her—drives the story forward. Angela Davis, Bill Moyers, Bill Ayers, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Danny Glover, Boggs’s late husband James, and a host of Detroit comrades across three generations help shape this uniquely American story. As she wrestles with a Detroit in ongoing transition, contradictions of violence and non-violence, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the 1967 rebellions, and non-linear notions of time and history, Boggs emerges with an approach that is radical in its simplicity and clarity: revolution is not an act of aggression or merely a protest. Revolution, Boggs says, is about something deeper within the human experience — the ability to transform oneself to transform the world.

As it kinetically unfurls an evolving life, city, and philosophy, the film takes the viewer on a journey into the power of ideas and the necessity of expansive, imaginative thinking, as well as ongoing dialectical conversation, to propel societal change. In an age when seemingly insurmountable injustices and contradictions face us, American Revolutionary inspires concerned citizens and dreamers of all ages with new thinking to sustain their struggle and engagement.

American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
NR – 82 min – Tickets $7
Fri, April 4: 7:00 p.m.
Sat, April 5: 7:00 p.m.
Sun, April 6: 7:00 p.m.
Thurs, April 10: 7:00 p.m.

Free Press interview with filmmakers (Showtime info is out of date)
New York Times review
The Hollywood Reporter review
http://www.villagevoice.com/2014-03-19/film/american-revolutionary-the-evolution-of-grace-lee-boggs/

http://www.freep.com/article/20140319/ENT01/303190010/1035/rss04