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The 9th annual Africa World Documentary Film Festival, sponsored by the E. Desmond Lee Professorship in African/African American Studies at the International Studies and Programs Office, University of Missouri-St. Louis, will run from Friday, February 5, to Sunday, February 7 at the Missouri History Museum, 5700 Lindell Blvd (63112). This international festival is committed to promoting knowledge of the life and culture of the people of Africa worldwide, in a cinematic Pan-African context. During its St. Louis run, the festival will feature 14 films from nine countries, including South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, China and the United States. This event is free and open to the public. Middle and high school students from St. Louis area, (including students from Pamoja Preparatory Academy – an African centered St. Louis Public School), are expected to attend the opening day of the festival.

One of the added attractions of the festival will be Q&A’s with...

Hello again, dear readers, and I hope you all avoided Fantastic Four like the plague this past weekend. On that topic, this is three weeks in a row that I’ve covered a comic book movie here on Trailer Trashin’. Now let’s dive into the new red band trailer for Deadpool.

Premise: In an attempt to cure his terminal cancer, former special forces operative Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is subjected to an experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, disfigured skin, and a dark and twisted sense of humor. Armed with new abilities and a new identity as “Deadpool,” Wilson hunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life.

Note: This is a red band trailer, which means it can only play in theaters with R-rated movies, and therefore is not appropriate for those under the age of seventeen. This trailer contains tons of violence, plenty of blood and gore,...

While many fans are expecting to see Deadpool at Comic-Con tomorrow, during 20th Century Fox's Hall H panel, the superhero adaptation has recently added a new cast member. Actress Leslie Uggams confirmed on her personal website that she has been cast as Blind Al in the superhero movie. The casting has yet to be confirmed by the studio, but the character could have an important role in Deadpool.

In the Marvel Comics, Althea, a.k.a. Blind Al, occasionally lives with Deadpool in his San Francisco abode known as "the Deadhut." She was formerly a U.K. intelligence officer who fought alongside Captain America in World War II. At one point, when Wade Wilson was a mercenary, before the Weapon X program, he was tasked with killing Blind Al in Zaire, but ended up killing everyone else but her. After the Weapon X program, when he turns into Deadpool, he kidnaps her,...

They often get quite a bit less attention than their fictional brethren, and it doesn’t help that many films fly under the radar while development and filming is underway. To chart this course with a little more precision, I’m launching Ioncinema.com’s latest feature, What’s Up Doc?, our monthly Top 50 Most Anticipated films, a sort of hitlist and/or snapshot of the most alluring, the most promising documentary film projects from the established documentarian guard, the new crop of future voices or the fiction filmmakers who on occasion dip their toes in the form. Curated by me, Jordan M. Smith, you’ll find docu items that are in their beginning stages to being moments away from their film festival berth. Like any such list, we can expect film items to fluctuate in ranking, with the cut-off being publicly items — such recent examples include Laura Poitras’s white hot Edward Snowden project,...

Rex Miller is an experienced documentary cinematographer, with projects including 2014's "Althea," HBO's "The Loving Story," "Behind These Walls," and the 2013 series "A Chef's Life." His most recent project is Cynthia Hill's "Private Violence," a documentary screening at Sundance which delves into two women's true stories of surviving domestic violence. What camera and lens did you use? Panasonic Af 100, Nikkor 35mm f1.4. What was the most difficult shot on your movie, and how did you pull it off? The opening scene of the film is my favorite. It's a very tense scene where a woman at a domestic violence shelter, who thinks she is there without the knowledge of her abuser, gets text messages from him that he is coming to get her. The pressure ratchets up, the cops are called, and people are scrambling for safety, as well as information. I feel we were successful in capturing the...