Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts (2019)

Releasing at April 16, 2021 in theaters

Documentary

Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts is documentary film directed by Jeffrey Wolf, and written by Fred Barron. The film stars Russell G. Jones, Jason Samuels Smith and Sharon Washington. It primiered at April 13, 2019 on Freep Film Festival – Detroit.

This illuminating documentary explores the life of a unique American artist, a man with a remarkable and unlikely biography. Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama. After the Civil War, Traylor continued to farm the land as a sharecropper until the late 1920s. Aging and alone, he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, both memories from plantation days and scenes of a radically changing urban culture.

Having witnessed profound social and political change during a life spanning slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration, Traylor devised his own visual language to translate an oral culture into something original, powerful, and culturally rooted. He made well over a thousand drawings and paintings between 1939-1942. This colorful, strikingly modernist work eventually led him to be recognized as one of America’s greatest self-taught artists and the subject of a Smithsonian retrospective.

Using historical and cultural context, The film brings the spirit and mystery of Traylor’s incomparable art to life. Making dramatic and surprising use of tap dance and evocative period music, the film balances archival photographs and footage, insightful perspectives from his descendents, and Traylor’s striking drawings and paintings to reveal one of America’s most prominent artists to a wide audience.

Director: Jeffrey Wolf

Writer: Fred Barron

Stars: Russell G. Jones, Jason Samuels Smith, Sharon Washington

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