We are thrilled to have been selected for the Seattle International Film Festival, one of the top film festivals in the country! Patrinell: The Total Experience will have its WORLD PREMIERE at SIFF on Sunday, May 26th at 4PM at the SIFF Egyptian Cinema. There will be a second screening on Monday May 27th at 3PM at the SIFF Uptown Cinema.
Tickets are available at SIFF.NET.
from the SIFF Film Guide:
The story of the indefatigable Patrinell Wright and her Total Experience Gospel Choir, an internationally recognized Seattle institution, is told against the backdrop of the Central District’s gentrification and our city’s racial history.
Seattle was a rude awakening for singer Patrinell Wright when she moved here from East Texas in 1964—far from the bastion of racial tolerance she’d expected—and the most affecting story she tells in Andrew Elizaga and Tia Young’s doc about her life is of her grueling three-and-a-half-day bus journey here. But she did have musical talent, deep faith, and unstoppable drive, all channeled into founding the Total Experience Gospel Choir and building it into an internationally recognized pillar of Seattle’s black community. Not without opposition: Church leaders gave her flak for singing in nightclubs, and years later for her ordination, and teachers at Franklin High School weren’t crazy about having someone without academic credentials come in and start a choir. (“My biggest fight came from my own people,” Wright admits.) This Franklin group, launched in 1973, was the seed of the TEGC, which by 1977 was touring the country and eventually the globe. But generous home-movie footage shows the choir’s shrinking, aging, and whitening over its 45 years, a transformation that played out against the Central District’s similar gentrification. (It’s shocking that today, one interviewee points out, the neighborhood is only 10% African-American.) Wright finally retired the choir last October, but Patrinell remains as a loving testament to her extraordinary career and the joy and spiritual solace her music brought to thousands.
Patrinell: The Total Experience 