September 19, 2001
Contact: John Newman (831) 459-2496; jtnewman@cats.ucsc.edu

Follow Me Home Puts a New Twist on the "Road" Movie

The road movie is a well-established genre in American film. The road movie genre has been around long enough, in fact, to develop subgenres, such as disenfranchised westerners traveling east to search for America--Peter Fonda's 1969 hippy epic Easy Rider is probably the most famous example. Westerners have always been insecure about their identity. The West is still the frontier--a vast and arid landscape where even its native sons and daughters inherit a congenital rootlessness, a land isolated by mountain ranges and broad deserts that has as much in common with Mexico, the Pacific Islands, and even the Far East, as it does with the rest of America.

Peter Bratt's film Follow Me Home, once again, follows the odyssey of westerners seeking to discover the nature of America, and their own place in it, beyond the Great Divide. But Bratt's pilgrims aren't the disaffected white, middle-class youth of Easy Rider--his film ups the ante by using the genré formula to explore the nature of race and identity in America.
Bratt describes his film as an "ethnic road movie." His travelers are four artists, one African American (Calvin Levels), one Native American (Steve Reevis), and two Chicanos (Jesse Borrego and Benjamin Bratt), who set out from Los Angeles for Washington, D.C., with the intention of painting a mural on the White House. Each carries his own personal and cultural wounds, and each seeks his own healing and resolution in the journey.

"Each of the men understands the symbolic power of such an event," writes Alice Walker, "aware that it is only when we can paint our own vivid dreams on the white blankness of the nation's canvas that we have a chance of bringing them, and ourselves, to life."

Away from the familiarity of urban L.A. streets, the broad western landscape becomes the canvas for their personal visions and illusions, and on the way they encounter yet another visionary in the person of an African American woman (Alfre Woodard) who joins the odyssey.

Dr. Eduardo and Bonnie Duran, executive producers of the film, developed the term "soul wound" in their book Native American Post Colonial Psychology (SUNY Press 1995). Bratt wanted to incorporate the Durans' theories of intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression among Native Americans and the descendants of slaves, situating these issues within a modern, urban, multi-cultural setting.

You can judge how well Bratt succeeded on October 5, when the film will be screened at UCSC. The exact time and place of the screening have not yet been determined, but will be available on the campus calendar, or by calling (831) 423-2917. Admission is free.
The film is being cosponsored by the Sociology Graduate Students of Color Caucus, and the Single Parents Action Network. Director Peter Bratt will lead a question-and-answer period following the screening.

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