Film
Personal Problems
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.
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Sex, religion, and vampirism collide in Bill Gunn’s visionary avant-horror masterpiece.
A previously unseen draft of Bill Gunn’s “meta-soap opera” and a TV performance by Gunn.