The Cinefamily (Venue Partner)
611 N Fairfax Avenue
323.655.2510
This event has passed.
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Jesco Night at Cinefamily
- When
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Sunday Feb 21, 2010 (8pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$12
- Links
Not simply a legend in his West Virginia hometown, Jesco White is better known the world over as "The Dancing Outlaw", the outrageous hard-living and -loving entertainer who learned his brand of Appalachian hot steps from D. Ray White, his dear ol' pa and one of the most famous "mountain dancers" of the 20th century. We present a pairing of the brand-new Jesco biopic White Lightnin' with the doc that started it all, Dancing Outlaw.
First up is the swaggering, stylized White Lightnin', featuring a sensational turn by British actor Edward Hogg. "Jesco's drugs of choice are gasoline and lighter fluid, plus the high he gets from performing the wild mountain dancing steps taught to him by his daddy -- but it's reform school and a lunatic asylum that teach Jesco how to fight, and fight he does. Redneck exploitation is gorgeously reinvented as Jesco explodes from one burst of trailer trashing rage to the next, in this brutal and demented hillbilly saga." (Salt Co.)
After the break, we'll take a look at the real Jesco's madcap life with Dancing Outlaw. Made for West Virgina public TV, the film is "one of the most bizarre, upsetting, and ultimately...inspiring documentaries to have emerged from the South, or from anywhere, in recent memory. It becomes, in the telling, the story of a family and of Appalachian culture -- besieged by a poverty impossible to romanticize; a culture that persists only in shards: in the pronunciation of words, in debased folk music and dancing, in a tradition of clan feuding, and in the encouragement of a certain kind of eccentricity that is, let us say, extreme." (Oxford American Magazine) Dancing Outlaw director Jacob Young will appear in-person for a Q&A after the screening!
