REWIND & PLAY Documentary

Screening to be preceded by a special introduction from historian Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis exhumes and reedits raw footage from an excruciating, never-aired 1969 interview with legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Intended for French television and conducted in French, which Monk does not speak, an undercurrent of polite discomfort and uneasy tension is already present as he begins to describe how he was poorly treated on his first visit to Paris as an unknown Black artist. Now a celebrated musician, returning over a decade later, he is interrupted, stopped and reprimanded by his irritated interviewer, host Henri Renaud, who demands that Monk be nicer. What remains uninterrupted are enthralling sequences of the brilliant musician performing live in the studio. Striking piano keys with powerful intention, sweat pouring down his face under bright studio lights, his music is an external expression of a heart-rending internal struggle, that of being a Black artist in a world dictated by white supremacy. –Malin Kan