An incredible film about the revered community hub, the Black barbershop, comes to streaming on Monday, November 20, 2023.
As part of the client of Harlem-based Black Public Media’s AfroPoP Digital Shorts series.
“…the extended family that is the Black barbershop…”
An offshoot of its award-winning documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange. A Little Off The Top is an animated film capturing the extended family that is the Black barbershop, just in time for Thanksgiving.
Directed by Brooklyn native and Los Angeles resident William D. Caballero, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow whose web series Gran’Pa Knows Best (featuring 3D printed miniatures of his Afro-Latino grandfather, giving advice to millennial viewers) aired for two seasons on HBO, A Little Off The Top is animated by digital artist Brad Jones. (Their film Chilly & Milly, which debuted at Sundance in 2022, took the Outstanding Animation Award at the 2022 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival.)
Highlighting a conversation recorded in a Charlotte, North Carolina barbershop, A Little Off The Top features 3D modeled figures of barber and customer, set amongst a miniature, hand-built barber shop set. The film captures the role of the Black barber as an unofficial therapist, role model, and friend.
Harlemites can watch A Little Off The Top on Black Public Media’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/@BlackPublicMedia at 7 a.m. EST., on Monday, November 20, 2023.
Black Public Media is the Harlem-based national funder and distributor of films about the Black experience founded (as the National Black Programming Consortium) in 1979. Its executive director Leslie Fields-Cruz, a key figure in Black and documentary film and public television, now chairs the board of New York Women In Film and Television (NYWIFT).
Photo credit: Black Public Media.
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