CINEMA-USA: No Space for ‘Lottoland’

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 9 1996 (IPS) - When John Rubino set out to make a film about his own multiracial community in urban Brooklyn, he tried to portray a different view of New York than the gangster-ridden world shown in other recent films on ghetto life.

He completed ‘Lottoland’ — a sweet, romantic comedy about the black, white and Puerto Rican residents of Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighbourhood — in 1993. But, three years later, Rubino still finds it difficult to show the movie in a film world dominated by gangster fables.

“Basically, the film has not found a niche,” Rubino says. Film companies, he argues, “can market comedies. They can market ‘gangsta’ films.” But ‘Lottoland’, he says, falls outside the cracks.

In recent years, Rubino contends, most films that focus on black life in the ghetto have been pictures, made largely by black directors, depicting urban life as violent, grim and dominated by gangs and drugs.

“I don’t believe it,” he says of the gangsta world. “That’s not how people live their lives.”

In Rubino’s film, the characters also live in a world marked by alcoholism, drugs and crime: one of the buildings that dominates the story is a ‘crack’ house, where youngsters make their living selling cocaine and avoiding police.

But Rubino, who produced, wrote and directed ‘Lottoland’ and financed the film’s 315,000-dollar cost by selling an old building he refurbished, chooses not to focus on the gangsters.

Instead, the film concentrates on a young couple (played by Lawrence Galliard Jr and Barbara Gonzalez) that find romance, and pursue their dreams, near the end of their high school years.

Their youthful romance, in turn, contrasts with the more cautious courtship that develops between their parents — including Galliard’s father, a mellow blues musician trying to combat alcoholism, played by blues singer Winard Harper.

Tied into their fortunes is a lottery ticket worth millions of dollars, won by Gonzalez’s father — but unclaimed since the father languishes in jail after a drug bust.

The film’s gentle ironies and wistful tone – “Women are sacred,” Harper advises his son in one poignant discussion — could not be further removed from the violent, angry world of John Singleton’s ‘Boyz n the Hood’ or Matty Rich’s ‘Straight Outta Brooklyn’.