DREAD BEAT AN BLOOD

In the newly restored DREAD BEAT AN BLOOD, screening now for the first time in America, Franco Rosso (director of cult classic BABYLON) portrays the life of the Jamaican-born dub poet and recording artist Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose voice has been fundamental to interpreting and presenting the political consciousness and vernacular of the 20th central Black freedom movement in the United Kingdom. A portrait of sound system artists amidst incendiary racial tension and police brutality in Brixton, DREAD BEAT AN BLOOD is built on the historical framework of the political struggle that underwrites Black bass culture. Set to the poetry and score of Johnson’s 1975 book of poetry-made-album of the same name, the film meditates on the insurgent spirit of Johnson’s music and poetry as inseparable from the everyday spaces in which struggle for liberation takes shape. As Johnson says about the stakes of sonic language in terms of a greater struggle for justice: “People are not just blood and flesh, but they have within them histories, knowledge, through centuries of time.”

PLUS!

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON IN CONCERT

The rarely-shown 1985 performance featuring Johnson with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band (the backing group on his seminal 1984 album, Making History), filmed for Channel 4 in the UK.