A long, strange trip for Black filmmaker’s ‘Cane River’
Son tracks down dad’s long-lost first feature film
Sacha Jenkins was 10 when his father, Horace B. Jenkins, completed his debut feature film “Cane River.” Sadly, when the older Jenkins completed production on it, he subsequently died of a heart attack. He was only 42.
“The film was shot in New Orleans and I was living in Queens,” remembers Jenkins, now 48. “But I did come down the summer, I believe, they were shooting. They were probably well into production at that point, or maybe they had wrapped. But, you know, the film wrapped and, then, it was edited and, then, my father died. And, then, it was just never distributed.”
After making a career as a documentary filmmaker, mostly working in public television, Jenkins wrote and directed this low-budget, romantic charmer — financed by a successful, African American family that has provided burial for Black folk since the Civil War — about a collegefootball star-turned-poet (Richard Romain) who returns home to rural northwest Louisiana and falls in love with a tour guide (Tommye Myrick) who has dreams of getting out of the sticks and going to college.
Even though these two are obviously sweet on each other, certain issues keep them from completely coming together. For example, the girl’s workingclass family keeps urging her to stay away from him since he comes from an upper-class family of Creoles whose ancestors owned slaves.
For decades, “River” was another lost piece of DIY, African American filmmak
ing, a movie that was shown only once — at a 1982 premiere screening in New Orleans — before disappearing altogether after Jenkins’s death. Legend has it Richard Pryor showed up in disguise to the screening and liked what he saw so much, he wanted to distribute the film through a deal he had with Warner Bros. (Remember that funeral family? They allegedly turned him down, which some have speculated led to Jenkins’ heart attack.)
The younger Jenkins, a former music journalist who went on to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a documentary filmmaker himself (he recently did the docuseries “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men” for Showtime), thought his old man’s first narrative feature was gone forever. That is, until he went online one day.
“Five years ago,” he recalls, “I just decided to Google my dad, and I found an article in the (New York) Times that talked about this organization called IndieCollect, who were sort of going through DuArt’s archive of unclaimed films that they wanted to get rid of, or was figuring out what to do with all that inventory.”
It turns out a negative of “River” was tucked away at DuArt, the nearly century-old, New York-based, film/recording studio where a lot of missing celluloid has ended up over the years. Says Jenkins, “Literally, I’ve been to that space, and the fact that they found ‘Cane River’ is literally like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Jenkins reached out to IndieCollect, who moved the film over to the Academy Film Archive (which struck up an archival 35 mm print), in the hopes of getting the movie shown in theaters. Two years ago, the film — digitally remastered and all — once again had another showing in the Big Easy, at the New Orleans Film Festival. This was followed by screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Ebertfest in Chicago.
Last year, indie-film distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories (cofounded by Jenkins’ old friend, Adam “MCA” Yauch from The Beastie Boys) snapped up the distribution rights and released it in February. Unfortunately, the pandemic put a kibosh on rolling it out to more theaters.
The movie is now available on many streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, The Criterion Channel and even Kanopy. On July 22, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will be showing the film via its Virtual Cinema, as part of the “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” film series.
Of course, Jenkins (who will have an online chat with Bun B about the movie at the Houston Cinema Arts Society’s YouTube channel, at 7 p.m. July 28) is glad that his father’s one-and-only fiction film is finally getting its big-screen moment. The work is just one of several recently unearthed films from the ’80s directed by dearly departed Black filmmakers (like Bill Gunn’s “Personal Problems” and Kathleen Collins’ “Losing Ground,” which the MFAH will start screening next month) that is intimate, intelligent and fully intent on showing African Americans as romantic, complicated human beings.
“I believe, you know, that he really wanted people to be entertained,” Jenkins says of his old man’s motives in making “River.” “He always felt it was important for people to be entertained, but he also felt it was equally important for people to be educated — and, also, for Black people to know about themselves.”