Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin' Women

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A portrait of the legendary female Jazz trumpet player Tiny Davis and her partner for over 40 years, the female drummer Ruby Lucas (real name Renee Phelan). In the 1940s, Tiny Davis was considered the "female Louis Armstrong" and her extraordinary talent made her the toast of the jazz world. Original archive footage gives us an impression of the personality and musical ability of these two female musicians. Interviews and live performances and, last but not least, Cheryl Clarke's poetic texts complete this film portrait. An hommage to two significant female musicians.

details

  • Runtime

    28 min
  • Country

    United States
  • Year of Presentation

    1989
  • Year of Production

    1988
  • Director

    Greta Schiller, Andrea Weiss
  • Cast

    Tiny Davis, Ruby Lucas, Dorothy Houston, Stevie Houston
  • Production Company

    Jezebel Productions
  • Berlinale Section

    Panorama
  • Berlinale Category

    Documentary Film
  • Teddy Award Winner

    Best Documentary/ Essay Film

Biography Greta Schiller

Greta Schiller is an award-winning independent producer/director of documentary films and the co-founder of Jezebel Productions, a women’s nonprofit production company since 1985. Over the first three decades of her career, her work focused on unearthing lost histories of marginalized groups and writing their experiences into the cultural narrative. For her films Before Stonewall, International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women, Paris Was a Woman, and The Man Who Drove with Mandela, among others, she has received two Emmy Awards, the first US/UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship in Film, Audience Awards for Best Film at numerous festivals from Berlin to Paris to Seattle, and artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts.

Biography Andrea Weiss

Born in Bristol, Pennsylvania in 1956, she is a documentary filmmaker and non-fiction author. In 1984 she co-founded with Greta Schiller the film production company Jezebel Productions which was recently honoured with a retrospective in Buenos Aires. She co-wrote and co-directed Escape to Life: the Erika and Klaus Mann Story which screened in the New German Films section of the Berlinale in 2001. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Programme. She has a PhD in history and has been professor of film and video at the City College of New York since 2003.

Filmography Andrea Weiss

1986 International Sweethearts Of Rhythm | 1996 A Bit of Scarlet | 1998 Seed of Sarah | 2001 Escape to Life: The Erika And Klaus Mann Story | 2017 U.N Fever