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SXSW live review: “When I Rise”
It was more than a little auspicious Sunday afternoon at the Paramount Theatre that opera singer Barbara Smith Conrad was greeted with waves of applause and standing ovations during the premiere of “When I Rise,” the intelligent, poignant and ultimately liberating documentary by Austin filmmaker Mat Hames chronicling Conrad’s life.
After all, when Conrad was a gifted young music student at the University of Texas in 1957 — part of the first group of African Americans to be admitted as undergraduates to Texas’ flagship university - she wasn’t initially allowed into the Paramount to see a film that her drama professor sent the class to see.
That was hardly the only injustice Conrad suffered in the still-segregated Texas of the 1950s.
Blocks from the Paramount Theatre, members of the Texas Legislature launched a campaign against UT to have Conrad removed from the lead role of a student opera production. Segregationist legislators couldn’t tolerate that black young woman was cast opposite a white young man in “Dido and Aenas.” Yet when UT officials bowed to the will of the legislature and removed Conrad, it ignited a drama that put the young mezzo-soprano in the national news.
Hames’ film starts not with the predictable flash of an historic headline — though a yellowed newspaper declaring “Negro Girl Withdrawn from UT Opera Cast” appears soon enough on the screen — but instead with Conrad’s upbringing in the nurturing, tight-knit African American community of Center Point in the bucolic woods of North East Texas. That grounding is important because later, when we learn that Conrad faces unconscionable harassment at UT (a white student spat in her face as she walked across campus), we’re remind that her mettle comes directly from an inner strength and pride instilled when she was a child. And that mettle sees her through to the present day: Conrad’s remarkably capacity to forgive is the ultimate star of “When I Rise.”
Hames and editor Sandra Guardado make clean, seamless work of stitching together an impressive stock of archival images and footage along with contemporary interviews. And that’s a good thing because Conrad’s story goes far beyond the Lone Star State, stretching over decades and continents. After leaving UT far behind her, Conrad launched a celebrated opera career that took her around the world, landing her on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera among other notable venues. However, it wasn’t until 2009 that she achieved a true reconciliation with her alma mater and the Texas state government when the legislature awarded her a honorific resolution.
But it’s not only Conrad’s story that unravels in “When I Rise.” UT’s arguably unresolved relationship with its racist past and Texas’ own continuing need for recognizing its civil rights history play major roles in the film. Admirably Hames doesn’t flinch from filling in this necessary context along with all its attendant complexities.
Produced under the auspices of UT’s Briscoe Center for American History — who raised the film’s approximately $500,000 budget and which maintains Conrad’s archive — “When I Rise” is ultimately about the extraordinary grace of an extraordinary woman.
It is imperative film viewing.
“When I Rise” screens again at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Paramount Theatre.
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