My Brother’s Wedding (1983)

South Central LA, the early 1980s. Pierce Mundy (Everett Silas) is always on the move without ever really getting anywhere -- kept busy by his parents, their dry cleaning shop, friends and neighbors. His childhood buddies are all in prison or dead and his best friend Soldier (Ronnie Bell) is just getting out of jail. Pierce's brother Wendell (Monte Easter), on the other hand, is an up-and-coming lawyer set to marry an upper-middle-class woman (Gaye Shannon-Burnett). Pierce is entirely lacking in ambition, to the consternation of his Bible-thumping mother (Jessie Holmes), and yet he is an integral part of life in the neighborhood. When Soldier is killed in a car accident, Pierce's conflicting obligations to family and friends manifest in the choice between his brother's wedding and his best friend's funeral, both falling on the same day. Charles Burnett's second feature after Killer of Sheep is a tragicomic classic of New Black Cinema in which lived realities are shown in even the smallest of supporting roles, complex and attentive. Pierce's wanderings reveal a portrait of a young man and a community defined in equal measure by stagnation, resignation, resistance and joie de vivre.