Whte Man's Burden [1995] with John Travolta

White Man's Burden (1995)



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114928/






White Man's Burden is a 1995 dramatic film about racism in an alternate America where African Americans and Caucasian Americans have reversed cultural roles.





John Travolta ... Louis Pinnock

Harry Belafonte ... Thaddeus Thomas

Kelly Lynch ... Marsha Pinnock

Margaret Avery ... Megan Thomas

Tom Bower ... Stanley

Andrew Lawrence ... Donnie Pinnock

Bumper Robinson ... Martin

Tom Wright ... Lionel

Sheryl Lee Ralph ... Roberta

Judith Drake ... Dorothy

Robert Gossett ... John

Wesley Thompson ... Williams

Tom Nolan ... Johansson

Willie C. Carpenter ... Marcus

Michael Beach ... Policeman #1 Outside Bar





The film revolves around Louis Pinnock a Caucasian factory worker (John Travolta), who kidnaps Thaddeus Thomas, a Black factory owner (Harry Belafonte) who fired him over a perceived slight.



The film was written and directed by Desmond Nakano.



The opening scenes of "White Man's Burden" are ingenious and interesting, as it turns the tables on the color-coding in American society. It simply reverses the stereotypical roles of blacks and whites: The black characters are the wealthy, powerful establishment types in the big house in the suburbs, and the whites are a poor, disadvantaged minority group.



This is, of course, as great an oversimplification as the other way around. But it works dramatically to make visible a lot of our assumptions and prejudices. When John Travolta, as a factory worker, uneasily approaches the mansion of Harry Belafonte, the millionaire factory owner, we're forced to acknowledge that if the worker were black and the rich man were white, the scene would seem routine. Because it isn't - because privilege is turned topsy-turvy in the world of this film - we're forced to re-evaluate every conversation and nuance.









"White Man's Burden" was written and directed by Desmond Nakano, who is a Japanese American and therefore well positioned to look at black and white in America from his own viewpoint. The movie was screened at this year's Virginia Film Festival, which had the theme of "U.S. and Them," and showed movies that pitted outsiders against insiders in many different ways. "To both sides, black and white," Nakano told me, "I am `them.' " And when he visited Japan for the first time, he said, he found himself subtly disturbed that everyone he saw was Japanese: "I had grown accustomed to being different. It felt wrong to be the same." These were the feelings that he drew on in making the film.