Coming Soon
EMMA MAE
1976
Director
Jamaa Fanaka
Starring
Jerri Hayes
Ernest Williams III
Charles D. Brooks III
Eddie Allen
Runtime
100 minutes
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After the death of her mother, country girl Emma Mae (Jerri Hayes) leaves Mississippi for Los Angeles, her shyness, plain looks and rough edges belying her extraordinary ability to beat down anyone who disrespects her or those she loves.
Retitled BLACK SISTER’S REVENGE to try to capture a wider audience, Jamaa Fanaka's sympathetic portrait of a young Black woman from the South making a difficult adjustment to life in the big city both riffs on and remakes the Blaxploitation genre; unlike the superheroics of a COFFY, FOXY BROWN or CLEOPATRA JONES, Emma Mae's remarkable proficiency at kicking ass seems to derive from her ability to tap directly into a wellspring of Black women's latent powers in order to protect and serve her own.
“Jamaa Fanaka takes the urban black social problem film and injects it with enough levity and action to make it more populist than something like KILLER OF SHEEP, yet he retains enough humanism and naturalism to keep it from tipping over into schlock. It's a miracle of a balancing act that makes this movie as unique as it is unpredictable. A literal Compton Rebellion.” - Laird Jimenez
Retitled BLACK SISTER’S REVENGE to try to capture a wider audience, Jamaa Fanaka's sympathetic portrait of a young Black woman from the South making a difficult adjustment to life in the big city both riffs on and remakes the Blaxploitation genre; unlike the superheroics of a COFFY, FOXY BROWN or CLEOPATRA JONES, Emma Mae's remarkable proficiency at kicking ass seems to derive from her ability to tap directly into a wellspring of Black women's latent powers in order to protect and serve her own.
“Jamaa Fanaka takes the urban black social problem film and injects it with enough levity and action to make it more populist than something like KILLER OF SHEEP, yet he retains enough humanism and naturalism to keep it from tipping over into schlock. It's a miracle of a balancing act that makes this movie as unique as it is unpredictable. A literal Compton Rebellion.” - Laird Jimenez