Bitter Fruit
[Music Video / Short Film]
Strange Fruit might have been the first Billie Holiday song I ever heard, which started a long love affair with her voice and catalogue. Years later, I discovered Strange Fruit was initially Bitter Fruit, an anti-lynching poem written by a Jewish New York high school teacher named Abel Meeropol. The poem was written in response to visiting the South in 1937, and being witness to its horrors.
Billie Holiday Abel Meeropol
I stumbled on Maria Delongoria’s dissertation, Stranger Fruit: The Lynching of Black Women. In it, she had an appendix of names of black female lynching victims. This list became the focus of the project.
The set is hand built by me. I manned the camera and cut the video. I also decided to use my voice to sing Strange Fruit.
The discovery propelled me to make this video. Maybe because I’m Jewish, or maybe because there always seems to be some kind of kinship (or perhaps a commiseration?) between the Jewish and African American community.
I stumbled on Maria Delongoria’s dissertation, Stranger Fruit: The Lynching of Black Women. In it, she had an appendix of names of black female lynching victims. This list became the focus of the project.
The set is hand built by me. I manned the camera and cut the video. I also decided to use my voice to sing Strange Fruit.