Black Fiddlers, a documentary film exploring the legacy of African Americans who contributed to shaping the cultural landscape of American folklore has been nominated to compete at D.C. Black Film Festival 2022. This is the second consecutive time that a film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, and produced by Heritage Film Project is selected by the prestigious festival in Washington.
Black Fiddler traces the personal and family stories of violin players of African descent in New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, and as far as Oregon during the Indian Wars and the Gold Rush.
Inspired by the legacy of Joe & Odell Thomson, director Montes-Bradley resorted to performers Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson from The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and old-time fiddler Earl White to reconstruct three-hundred years of Black music with the help of local historians, academics, and award-winning authors like Kip Lornell and John J. Sullivan.
Black Fiddlers is the result of one year of uninterrupted research, on the road and on location. The result is a compelling one-hour documentary film carefully designed to inform and entertain while presenting the audience with a diversity of arguments never explored before on film.