Cord Jefferson, award-winning American screenwriter and director, Oscar® and Emmy winner, held a master class at the Bosnian Cultural Center on Saturday, August 17, as part of the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival program. The master class was moderated by writer Ennis Ćehić.
Jefferson spoke about his film AMERICAN FICTION, which will be shown tonight at 8:30 p.m. at the Coca-Cola Open Air Cinema as part of the Open Air program. He began the conversation by pointing out that it is difficult for people in America to talk about race, sexuality and identity without becoming emotional, angry and upset.
“It’s especially hard to laugh at these things and find them humorous, so I decided to put a scene at the beginning that gives people permission to laugh and makes it clear to them that in this film we’re not going to take these topics too seriously,” Jefferson said, adding that AMERICAN FICTION deals with these topics differently.
Based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson’s hilarious directorial debut, which explores the contemporary obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright plays Monk, a frustrated novelist fed up with the establishment’s profiteering from black entertainment that relies on hackneyed and offensive cliches. To prove his point, Monk writes his own offbeat black book under a pseudonym – a book that takes him to the heart of the hypocrisy and insanity he claims to despise.
