Director: Horace Jenkins
Writer(s): Horace Jenkins
Starring: Tommye Myrick, Richard Romain, Carol Sutton, Barbara Tasker
Synopsis: CANE RIVER is a historically informed love story set in Louisiana’s Natchitoches Parish, a “free community of color.” Aspiring writer and hopeless romantic Peter – former athlete and scion of an elite Creole family – returns to his hometown and immediately falls for a breathtaking historical tour guide, Maria. Maria’s disenfranchised, darker-skinned family disapprove of Peter’s family and condemn their burgeoning romance while highlighting the painful legacy of colorism in their tightly-knit community. The lovers must work through Peter’s contentious family legacy as privileged, former slave-owning, light-skinned Creoles if they want their romance to survive.
Release Date: October 14, 1982 (West Germany) | Length: 104 min | Genre: Drama, Romance | MPAA Rating: NR
Note: The film made a gala debut in New Orleans and Richard Pryor showed interested in distributing the romantic drama, but the film was lost after Jenkins died at 42, months after the movie’s completion. After decades, the film’s original negative was acquired in 2013 by the Academy Film Archive from the DuArt Film & Video Vault, and was remastered by IndieCollect with Oscilloscope for its release. I haven’t found a picture of Horace Jenkins yet.