Director Al Milgrom Attending!
All-singing, all-dancing, this is the lively, lovely story of a village polka band and its city cousins, shot in the bread-basket of southern Minnesota. Singin' in the Grain captures what it means to be a Czech-American today and, by extension, one's own identity as an American. In folksong and dance, the Eddie Shimota Polka Band is followed for more than 40 years and three generations by documentarist Al Milgrom (The Dinkytown Uprising). After the post-communist 1989 Velvet Revolution, a new generation of immigrants arrives with their own folk-Slavic beat and different vibes, a far cry from Eddie's world. As Minnesota's "Czech Triangle" (New Prague, Montgomery, Veseli and Lonsdale) and St. Paul's Sokol Hall celebrate with symbolic food, dance, costume, parades, and holidays defining who they are, the film becomes a passport for re-examining America's historic immigrant odyssey.
Director Biography
Al Milgrom, founder and artistic director of U Film Society, 1962, and co-founder of Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, 1981, has had a second career as a filmmaker going back to grad student days at University of Minnesota. Credits include doc features _Russian Journey_ (1959), Dinkytown Uprising (2015); shorts: The Bramble Experience (1971) , Rediscovering John Berryman (2014). Co-director and editor Daniel Geiger is veteran filmmaker based in Minneapolis.
Daniel Geiger has worked in the film business for over 37 years on feature films such as: Fargo, North Country, Purple Rain, Wildrose, Far North, Herman-U.S.A., Snow and The Jingle Dress. And edited documentaries such as: First Daughter and the Black Snake and The Dinkytown Uprising. Based in Minneapolis, he works primarily as an editor or assistant editor, but over the years he has worked in LA, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, in every facet of filmmaking. Daniel entered filmmaking as a cinematographer, producer and writer/director on his own short films. He was a cinematographer on the Oscar-winning documentary, American Dream by Barbara Kopple.
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