The Learning Tree
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This visually beautiful and moving, if somewhat sentimentally melodramatic, story of a black teenager growing up in Kansas in the 1920s was the first feature film by a black director to be financed by a major Hollywood studio. Acclaimed photojournalist Gordon Parks directed, produced, wrote, and composed the score of this adaptation of his 1963 semi-autobiographical novel. Essentially a coming-of-age story, the film focuses on Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson, son of "Star Trek" co-star Nichelle Nichols). Newt's nemesis is Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), an embittered young man burdened with an absent mother and a negligent, angry father. Newt, by contrast, is supported by his hard-working, understanding mother (Estelle Evans), who has kept her son on the square despite the hardships and racism he must face. Parks depicts the ambiguous racial attitudes of blacks and whites in the Kansas town with an ironic complexity rarely found in earlier films about racism.
The Learning Tree was added to the National Film Registry in 1989.
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