Film Focuses On Racism in America

That is the view of Omowale Akintunde, who has spent the week shooting a feature film about race.

The movie, which bears the provocative title "Wigger," tells the story of an aspiring white R&B singer who is struggling to overcome a racist and impoverished family background.

It stars Anna Maria Horsford -- who has appeared on such TV shows as "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," "The Bernie Mac Show" and "Grey's Anatomy" -- and David Oakes as R&B singer Brandon.

Filming began at various locations in north Omaha last week. Some scenes also were shot in the west Omaha home of retired Walnut Hills Elementary School principal Edwardene Taylor Armstrong and her husband, former Omaha Housing Authority director Robert Armstrong.

The movie is currently scheduled for an April 2010 release.

Akintunde, who became chairman of the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Black Studies Department last year, said the message of his film is clear.

"We still have institutional racism in America," he said during a break Friday. "Look what happened to Gates."

Gates, the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, was arrested for disorderly conduct on the porch of his Cambridge, Mass., home after a confrontation with a police officer. Police had responded to a report of a suspected break-in at the home.

The charge was later dropped, but the arrest nonetheless drew sharp criticism from President Barck Obama, who said the police had "acted stupidly." On Friday, Obama conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology. He personally telephoned both Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, and invited them to the White House for a beer.

Akintunde, a widely published academic who also directed several previous films, is intentionally less conciliatory than Obama. The director, a graduate of the New York Film Academy, wants to stir up debate. And he sees some similarities between Gates' arrest and his film.

Gates was a black man who had seemingly transcended race to live in an affluent white neighborhood and teach in white America's most prestigious university.

"But no one can really get completely beyond their race in America," Akintunde said. "It is still a defining aspect of our lives."

That's certainly true of the film's lead character.

Brandon is a working class white kid who is so comfortable with African-American culture that he feels he has become, in a sense, post-racial.

He has African-American love interests in Shondra (Kim Patrick) and Lavita (Arkeni). He has an African-American best friend in Antoine (Eric Harvey). And, of course, he expresses himself through African-American music.

But Brandon's struggles to get beyond both his past -- his father is a strikingly unattractive neo-Nazi -- and his race seem doomed from the start.

As the middle-class Antoine points out, Brandon will always be privileged, despite his working-class roots, because he is white.

"This film is fearless in addressing our racial taboos," said Horsford, who plays Antoine's mother.

Akintunde's movie isn't the first film to be shot in Omaha this year. 

Director Jason Reitman and actor George Clooney were here for two days in April to film scenes for "Up in the Air." Writer/director Nik Fackler also filmed his debut feature "Lovely, Still" in Omaha.

"Wigger" is the second film Akintunde has made this year. In January, he traveled with some of his students to Obama's inauguration. He turned that into a film called "An Inaugural Ride to Freedom."

Akintunde said that the city of Omaha will be one of the leading characters in "Wigger." The director and the cinematographer, Jean-Paul Bonneau, spent considerable time earlier this week filming scenes around such places as Timeout Chicken and Love's Jazz and Art Center.

He filmed at the Armstrong home because its comfortable middle-class African-American decor seemed like the perfect backdrop for Antoine.

"This movie addresses serious issues," Akintunde said. "But it's also a love affair with Omaha."