Walls & Bridges

Trent is a successful black art director who paints in his spare time. He meets Camille who teaches art at an orphanage. She is a nun, white and a bit different. The result is love and marriage. The reactions from their families don't wait. In Walls & Bridges a man and a woman from opposite worlds are brought together in a Jove story which transcends racial barriers and cliches.

Comment:
Camille is a nun who wears flowered socks and carries a walk man. She teaches art in an orphanage. She is pious, but different and is searching for something else. She is white.
Trent is an Art Director who paints big expressionist paintings in his free time. He is pushed around in his relationship with the dominant, jealous and rich boss of the advertising agency where he works. He is black.
None of the two are at all happy about their lives. They meet by chance through work and in each other they find a lot of what they have been missing; quiet harmony and mutual respect.
Camille leaves her order of nuns and Trent leaves his girlfriend and gives back the sports car she gave him. Camille and Trent get marned.
A scenario that could have been taken
from a Harlequin romance of the more sugary kind, if it wasn't for the relatives and ex-girlfriends who have a hard time swallowing it without coughing up preconceived ideas and empty phrases about blacks and whites. Prejudices like: ”You white women just have to snap your fingers and a black stud comes running” (something that you don't say with impunity to an ex-nun ... ).
Camille and Trent do not lower themselves to such levels, which raises this film debut one step above an ordinary ”us-against-them” film. Especially since the budding idyll is shattered by an accidental shot at Trent's temple. Something which brings the fact that they chose each other to a head and forces former antagonists into reconciliation.
Instead this film, set to soft jazzy music (the soundtrack is by Teo Macero who produced Miles Davis, played with Charlie Mingus and reaped 15 Gold Records), turns into a subtle, broad and general drama of relations with a bitter note. Maybe even more than what the director, Uzo (who has lent his autobiographical experiences as well as paintings by his own hand to the film) himself realizes. It is marketed as a film about ''love across the race barriers'', but it is really more than that.
Susanne Ljung

Medverkande
Mark D. Kennerly, Ellen Tina Landress: Producent
Uzo: Manus
Uzo: Foto
John R. Rosnel!: Musik
Teo Macero: Talat språk
English