Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Warming By The Devil's Fire

A Film By Charles Burnett

Charles Burnett explores his own past as a young boy who was shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and Mississippi, and who was musically torn between a mother who loved the blues and a grandmother who believed that the blues was the devil's music. Burnett's film boldly mixes fictional storytelling with documentary footage in a tale about a young boy's encounter with his family in Mississippi in 1955, and tensions between the heavenly strains of gospel and the devilish moans of the blues.

Says Burnett: "The sound of the blues was a part of my environment that I took for granted. However, as years passed, the blues slowly emerged as an essential source of imagery, humor, irony and insight that allows one to reflect on the human condition. I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content but also alludes to the form itself. In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues."