Join us on Monday, December 14th for a screening and conversation with
The Forty-Year-Old Version Director, Writer, and Star Radha Blank
Nearing 40 and still struggling as a playwright, frustrated New Yorker Radha turns to a different kind of stage, awakening a rapper alter-ego named RadhaMUSprime. As her revitalized artistic voice blossoms, Radha must learn to juggle her two personas—and two unique New York art scenes.
In her debut feature, writer-director Radha Blank plays the deeply personal lead role, a magnetic presence with a unique perspective, creating a film that is a fresh addition to the New York City slice-of-life canon.
Watch the film: Available on Netflix
Join the Q&A: Monday, December 14th at 4PM EST
Cost: Free
Moderated by NYWIFT Board VP of Programming Leslie Fields-Cruz
Panelists
Winner of the Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Directing Award, Radha Blank is a director, performer, writer, and proud native New Yorker. A Helen Merrill Award recipient, Radha’s acclaimed play SEED was deemed “fresh, lively…and poetic” by HuffPost. She’s since written for Empire (Fox) and She’s Gotta Have It (Netflix). Radha’s script for The Forty-Year-Old Version was chosen for the 2017 Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs and garnered the 2017 Adrienne Shelly Women’s Filmmaker Award and the 2018 Maryland Film Festival Producers Club Award. When not writing for the stage and screen, Radha performs as RadhaMUSprime, whose brand of hip-hop comedy has sold out shows from New York to Norway. Named one of “10 Directors to Watch for 2020” by Variety, Radha’s feature filmmaking directorial debut The Forty-Year-Old Version has been hailed by critics as “funny, thought-provoking, wholly original” and “forever relevant.”
Leslie Fields-Cruz (Moderator) started at BPM, formerly National Black Programming Consortium, in 2001 managing grant making activities that supported the production and development of documentary programs for PBS. By 2005, she was the Director of Programming, leading the distribution of all funded programs to public television. In 2008, with six independent titles in need of a public television broadcast, Leslie launched AfroPoP: The Ultimately Cultural Exchange, a documentary series highlighting the variety and depth of the global black experience. AfroPoP has garnered several awards and is the only national public television series focused solely on stories from the black experience. In the fall of 2014, Leslie became BPM’s third Executive Director. Though she keeps the pulse on the development of program content and its distribution across public media platforms, she is focused on growing BPM’s resources to enable it to support more stories about the black experience.
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NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
