Film

Described by writer Ishmael Reed as a “meta-soap opera,” Gunn’s magnum opus is at once sprawling and intimate, an epic, passionately intense portrait of a group of middle-class African-Americans in early 1980s Manhattan. Despite boasting a powerful central performance from anthropologist and writer Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and expressively rough, shot-on-early-video cinematography by renowned photographer Robert Polidori, Personal Problems went unseen in its intended form for years. With this new restoration, it assumes its rightful status as a one-of-a-kind watershed of American independent filmmaking.