While a group of young men and women from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Senegal were taking a Spanish course to enter their freshman year in the film school created by Gabriel García Márquez in Cuba, I taught them Historia del Cine in a mixture of English, French and Spanish. I remember to this day their pretty faces (they were all very beautiful!) and their brilliant eyes with fascination as they discovered the early stages in the evolution of cinema, especially when I showed them this movie. By that time (around late 1980s) I had not seen the work of Afro-descendant filmmakers as Oscar Micheaux, or the ethnographic shorts by Zora Neale Hurston, so I used Vidor's production to illustrate the films with "all-Black cast". Of course the tale, music and actors were very attractive to them (as they are still to me), but for them it was also a revelation.
Review of Hallelujah
