This is the Life
- This is a past program
Part of Summer Night Cinema: 50 Years of Hip Hop, celebrating the art form's impact on music, film, and pop culture. Curated by critic Ernest Hardy.
Ava DuVernay’s 2008 documentary chronicles L.A.’s groundbreaking alternative hip hop movement crystalized in Leimert Park’s legendary Good Life Café, which birthed a slew of underground rap legends in the 1990s, including Freestyle Fellowship, Jurassic 5, and Cut Chemist. Their collective rhymes, which existed in a parallel universe to gangsta rap, explored the complexities, humor, and everyday surrealism of life in L.A. and beyond.
DuVernay’s own background as a rapper (as one half of the duo Figures of Speech) serves her well here; her chemistry with the film’s subjects (Myka 9, Chali 2na, Medusa, Abstract Rude, Busdriver, and more) crackles through the screen as they muse on art, life, and the unpredictability of both. She fills the film with priceless archival performance footage.
(2008, dir: Ava DuVernay, color, 97 minutes)
Summer Night Cinema is sponsored by Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
